RAMAC
More info
- Owner
- IBM
- Released
- 1956
- Type
- Hard disk drive
- Capacity
- about 3.75 MB
The world's first hard disk: fifty twenty-four-inch platters holding less than a single phone photo.
The IBM 350, the heart of the 305 RAMAC system, shipped in 1956. The name stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control, and random access was the point: with magnetic tape you had to wind past everything before the record you wanted, while RAMAC reached any record in under a second. Capacity was five million characters, barely four megabytes, in a cabinet the size of two refrigerators.
The machine was not sold but leased, for around $3,200 a month. Random access changed what computers were used for — stock levels, account balances and reservations could be kept current instead of updated in overnight batch runs. It is the same difference that later separated databases from files.