The Hard Drive Turns 50!

The hard disk drive was invented in 1955 by Reynold Johnson and first used when IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC computer on September 13th, 1956.

The RAMAC was the first computer to include a disk drive. Prior to this magnetic computer storage had consisted of core memory, tape, and drums. The magnetic disk was seen as a replacement for the magnetic drum for the same reason 78 RPM Records eventually replaced Edison cylinders- more storage with less space.

As a music player, the RAMAC would have been lousy. The drive weighed a ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks, each the size of a large pizza, was 5 megabytes. You might squeeze two MP3 songs onto the whole drive!

The hard disk changed the world and today we use it to store videos, music, photographs from our digital cameras and of course data on our computers.

For those of you really interested in hard drive technology - you can read more on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive

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October 2006

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