50th Anniversary
What measures 24" in diameter, contains 50 platters, weighs a few ton, and costs $50,000? Give up? The world's first hard drive in 1956 which weighed in at a whopping 5MB of total storage. 50 years later we are approaching the 1 Terabyte limit in single disk design. To put it in perspective, that is 200,000 times the size of the first disk in a package the size of a small paperback book.
IBM introduced the first magnetic hard drive in 1956 with the introduction of the IBM 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (Ramac).
The device signalled the end of punch cards and magnetic drums as the primary storage mediums.
Head over to Vnunet.com to catch a pretty interesting read on the 50th anniversary of the hard drive.
