Things sure have changed over the years...
Bill Healy, executive vice president at Hitachi, holds up a platter
from a 1-inch microdrive in his right hand. In his left is a 24-inch
platter from IBM's RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and
Control), which came out 50 years ago. A 1-inch 8GB platter holds
more than 80,000 times as much data as a single 24-inch RAMAC
platter. An 8GB 1-inch drive holds 1,600 times as much data as RAMAC.
A 14-inch platter (right) is dwarfed by its 24-inch
predecessor. Fourteen-inchers came out in the early 1960s, when
demand began to grow. Disks with 14-inch platters were stacked into
heavy, but moveable, bundles that could be carried from one system
to another.
In 1952, a small IBM research laboratory for finding new
approaches to data processing was founded in a leased building in
San Jose, Calif., under the leadership of Rey Johnson. Under
Johnson's leadership, the lab created the first magnetic disk drive
and an associated online transaction-oriented system.
This model established the feasibility of a rotating
magnetic disk stack. A vertical shaft was chosen later to simplify
the addition of other access mechanisms.
The original hard disk drive, known as the RAMAC, in
1956 stored only 5 megabytes of data on 50 disks, 24 inches in
diameter. It weighed more than 250 kilograms.
Healy of Hitachi shows off one of the original RAMAC systems.
Technically, the RAMAC is the entire storage system, and the drive
inside of it is called the 350. Crown Zellerbach, a San Francisco
paper company that produced computer card stock for IBM, got the
first RAMAC. Customers always wanted to see it, said Jim Porter,
president of Disk/Trend, who worked at Crown at the time.
"It made a fair amount of noise because there was forced air that
blew out between the head and the disk to keep the head from rubbing
on the disk," Porter recalled in an interview last month. "It was
the air compressor that made the noise."
The RAMAC's 50 stacked platters could have held just about two iTunes
songs.
Compare the size of the RAMAC's disk stack with a modern
1-inch microdrive platter. In the RAMAC, the head couldn't touch the
platters. Engineers had to compensate for air, dust and other
environmental factors. Later drives encapsulated the head inside the
drive.
The RAMAC's head scooted up and down the stack to find
data. There were 100 stops--one for each side of the 50 magnetic
platters.
On the left is an aerial photograph of IBM's hard drive
plant in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. On the right is the same site
20 years later.
John
Haanstra, left, initiated a study of the system implications of
large-scale random access. His work changed the course of the computer
industry.
On the right is the world's first data-processing system for storing
computer data on magnetic disks. The system enabled the handling of
transactions as they occurred. This demonstrated the path to the
online, real-time applications that are so prevalent today.
This 1957 prototype demonstrated a new technology using
disk drive heads and tracks rather than magnetic tape. The first
commercial use of the technology was IBM's 3330, in 1971.
