At the size of a refrigerator, IBM performed its miracle in 1956!
It was in the mid-1950s when IBM unveiled the first hard drive the world had ever seen.
And yes, it was bigger than a refrigerator and weighed more than a ton!
This early hard drive was an integral part of a larger machine, the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), which saw its own glory days.
Even better, a fully functional model has been housed at the Computer History Museum in California since 2002, when Dave Bennet and Joe Feng restored an old RAMAC to its original form.
As you will see in the relevant IBM promotional video from 1956, which summarizes the 5 years of research and development of the computer, the system was built so that corporate records (accounts, payments, payroll, orders, etc.) could be updated in real time, saving businesses from paperwork!
RAMAC gave humanity the first magnetic storage medium, allowing the user to recall data instantly and without delay. It was indeed a colossal step forward, as it introduced the same basic technology that is still used in computers today!
The RAMAC hard drive could only store 5 MB of data, which is just one MP3 music file in today's terms! And while that number may seem small now, in the 1950s it was truly enormous.
Its size was also enormous, with RAMAC easily filling a room.
But it is the very story of hard drives in the flesh, as the technology launched with RAMAC would later lead to much smaller hard drives, which would revolutionize computer science..
Source: newsbeast.gr
