Slashdot Mirror
The 305 RAMAC — First Commercial Hard Drive
Captain DaFt writes "Snopes.com has an article that gives an interesting look back at the first commercial hard drive, the IBM 350. Twice as big as a refrigerator and weighing in at a ton, it packed a whopping 4.4MB! Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us have on our keychains today."
Wow, I remember my first hard drive for the TRS-80 Model II that I had. It was a 5MB primary hard disk system that required you to turn a key to power it on, then wait while it ran up sounding like a jet engine before you pressed the "active" button to enable reading and writing. The cool thing about it was that you could actually hack it and get it to work on my later Apple ][+ that I used throughout junior high, high school and half of college before replacing it with a Mac IIci. Oh yeah, it weighed about 20 lbs and was in a case bigger than the Apple ][+ case alone. Finally, the interesting thing is that Kryder's law has been maintained over time like Moore's law and it is stunning how much storage space money buys these days. I seem to recall that original 5MB Tandy hard drive costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $4000, and for that money I can now buy ~16TB of storage like this setup in my office.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Who's ever going to need all that space? :-)
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us have on our keychains today.
Wow, yes. Storage density has increased over time. Amazing. I never noticed that before.
With all this improvement, why haven't we gotten to the point where I can buy a 20 GB hard for $20?
At the rate at which bit torrent burns through my hard drives, I am reluctant to spend any real amount of money on them. $20 sounds about right for something that lasts about 3 months before it dies and takes all my data with it.
pen drive: will fit in my pocket
RAMAC: will maybe fit in my kitchen
pen drive: holds quite a bit of data
RAMAC: can't hold that much data
pen drive: cannot be used as cover in a gun fight
RAMAC: essentially is a battlement worthy of any castle
AND THE WINNER IS....... RAMAC! I know I want a storage device that protect me from sundry projectiles.
I got a catholic block.
Will they ever cover the rumor of conscious editors at /.?
Is it the model IBM 350 is the harddrive and the 305 RAMAC is the computer.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
According to the photo in the article, it was also a portable drive.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
... does it run Linux?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Those 1-4GB usb drives will be a joke in the not too distant future too.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
It's too bad that you can't fit the equivalent ratio of *beer* on your keychain..
I'm sick of storing all my porn on punchcards.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Well it wasn't that popular, never made the water cooler news of the day. Never heard the phrase "Is that a IBM 350 or you just happy to see me!" Maybe a little before its time.
The rule is really very simple: standard hard drives (i.e. excluding things like micro-drives) really have a nearly constant price of roughly $250/pound. Most of what's changed over time has been the amount of data you can store per pound.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Most programs during that time period were only mathematical equations that in the most complex forms sometimes didn't reach 1 KB. To have storage the size of 4.4 MB was almost unheard of, and was the dream of universities and labs that required automation of formulas. It really does make one appreciate that $20 memory stick that we all take for granted to keep our files for work/college. One gigabyte on a keychain would amaze the computer engineers of the post-WW2 era. I never ceases to astound me how fast computing has evolved.
I carry a laptop with me everywhere, I have all my data on its 250GB HDD. I have no need for a USB drive on my keychain. I do need to grab one soon for special purposes, but it's never going to be on my keychain, it's going to be in my backpack with other assorted tools I almost never have need of for rare use at customer sites in environments where network connectivity is limited.
My brother, who is largely computer illiterate but finally got a machine the other year has had his hard drive die.
... sometimes it just boggles my mind what people can buy now. Hell, your average pharmacist will have GB+ memory cards for digital cameras for about $25 nowadays.
So, he was telling me that he figured he could get 2 GB of RAM and 500GB HD for $150. At first, I didn't believe him; then I checked prices, then I almost fell over.
Having personally paid $600+ for 16MB of RAM (and thinking it was a good deal) the fact that for less than $200 you can buy that much stuff shocks me.
Having had computers whose memory was measured in K, that didn't have hard drives, and whose CPU speeds were measured in single-digit Hz
Every now and then when I stop to realize how far we've come it just bakes my noodle! =)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The article (quoting an EETimes article) says, "5 million characters (not bytes, they were 7-bit, not 8-bit characters)." However historically a byte could refer to anywhere from 5 to 12-bits; it's only relatively recently that it's assumed that 8-bits is one byte. That's why 8-bits is referred to as an octet in protocol specifications.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Well the first flash drives were about as large as a Pinto and the required USB ports the size of a garage door.
You youngsters fail to appreciate history.
solid, hard, heavy tons of data...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
there is probably an IBM site out there that is still running one of these things.
All that 1940s-50s-60s IBM gear was fun to watch. I think they designed it that way on purposes. The mechanical engineering in those things was as impressive as the electrical engineering. I only saw a RAMAC once, when I was in high school, on a gee-whiz tour of an IBM office... it was, I think, in White Plains, New York, but might have been in New York City.
It only had a single head, so it basically move in two dimensions. It would retract all the way out from the stack of disks then zip quickly to another disk and insert itself to read the other disk. During the visit I briefly saw it "vibrating" crazily back and forth on one of the disks. It was explained to me that it was copying a file.
They all had those great big lighted buttons; separate on and off buttons, no push-on-push-off nonsense. the "on" button was always slightly recessed, while the "off" button always projected slightly, so that any one accidentally bumping against the machine would be turning it off rather than on...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You can't make a flash stick walk across the floor by seeking back and forth on the disk at the right frequency!
why hasn't anyone told me?
How did the average person react to conversations about computers at the time? Were people generally knowledgable about the existence of this technology and its applications in 1956? I look at this photograph on Snopes and I wonder if passersby scratched their heads like baffled monkeys at these "com-pyoo-tars". I asked my parents how "aware" they were of computers throughout the decades and the best answer they give me is "I don't know, I was working". "Well when's the first time you recall a computer in your workplace?" "Oh I don't know, I never really noticed." What?
I know my computer history. I just don't know how much computers had a firm grip (or no grip at all) on the public zeitgeist in the pre-Internet (or at least pre-Reagan-80's) days.
Back in 1985, when I joined HP, the state of the art was the HP 7925 (~300MB), a washing-machine sized drive. And boy, did they really make it "bullet-proof" - if you remember the machine-room scene in Terminator 2, those were all 7925's that were stopping the "bad" Terminator's 21st-century bullets..
Truly Moore's Law is an amazing thing.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Maybe the first commercial one, but not the first.
Proof
Wow!?!? Computer technology gets smaller?? Who knew? I am amazed! oh, no, wait thats boredom.
http://www.pcprogress.com/product.asp?m1=pw&pid=IBMDRHS36D
...even the simplest computer took up six city blocks, and was over ten storeys tall if you included the intercooler arrays.
My sixteen brothers and sisters had to walk forty-six kilometers through the blistering snow to even reach the keyboard, and then even when you did each key required over nine pounds per inch of pressure to depress them. And, since this was before Dvorak composed his famous New World symphony, the keys were always arranged in a completely random order.
Next we would chop wood and heft it into the boiler to keep the computer going, pausing only to replace vaccuum tubes or to put in a few hours at a Dickensian sweat-shop in order to afford that previous penny to buy us a sasperilly to share between us.
We all had tuberculosis, of course, which was the style at the time.
But did we complain? No, we didn't. We performed floating point calculations by tying little knots in the tatters from our pants, and rendered sums for the differential equations the war effort needed to bomb out the Nazis. How much RAM did we have, you ask? We had 1 bit. Today my grandson complains when his WoW refresh rates are too low, but back then we made out just fine with 1 bit of RAM and a box of Cracker Jacks.
Monochrome? We could only dream. Our display was semichrome. And our printer? His name was Guttenberg.
Man, those were the days.
These stories are free but worth money.
I am glad i have a nice small 80MB Hard drive that only weighs 175lbs and is the size of a mini fridge.
;)
:) hehe, i have been playing multiplayer computer games for 25 years now :O
;)
Isn't progress grand
Of course i can't actually TURN IT ON as it draws 1950w on startup and the old wiring in my house doesn't like that added to the seperate drive controller required plus the CPU plus the CRT....
One of these days i'll add a 20amp circuit so i can play electronic battleship again
i have a pic if anyone wants but i don't want to slashdot my ISP
Since there will be a zillion posts about 5-1/4" 10MB drives i need one of those for my blackmarket Compaq...
Sure, we might now have hundreds of GB hard disks, but the size of everything has blown out too.
One of the biggest problems is doing backups. In the 80s you could back up all your work on a single floppy (or maybe a few). Now it's a lot more complicated.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...they still have a product page for it: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_PH0305.html
What? They're not still selling it?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I have a 305 RAMAC on my keychain, you insensitive clod!
Or $500.00 for 2Meg of Ram for my Amiga 1000.
Or $1K for my first 1Gig hard drive, thinking I would NEVER fill it.
I could talk about my Sinclair kit computer, but that was so long ago, I can barely remember the details myself.....
Just to give an idea, you can expect about only about 3000 visits over 4 hours from a link in a comment this far down in a story. Unless your photos are crazily large or your ISP has really mean quotas your site wont be "slasdoted" so just go ahead and post the link. People that enjoy this story will also enjoy your photos. Go ahead and share it around.
We've had revolutions and evoloutions in technology over the last 25 years, from removable media, display devices (GPU and display itself) printing, communications etc
Hard disks are basically a very clever tape drive, it's sequentially laid out information that has a head clever enough to access the data anywhere on the disk.
Sure they don't cost much now, they seem relatively reliable, sometimes even cheap, kind of big and kind of fast, well they seem that way anyhow.
In my not so humble opinion, the hard drive is the ass end of our machines, almost aways being responsible for us sitting around waiting.
It's high time we had disks in the multi-terrabyte sizes and more so high time we had very very high performance disks. 100mb a second (very best case scenario) simply doesn't cut it, not with 7-20ms random access times.
Give us ns level access times and a couple of gb a second please (anyone who responds with SATA is 300gb a second, please excuse yourself from this website)
Hard drives, I love them and I hate them, always the reason my fingers are twiddling.
This article smells of bullshit. I won't believe it until I look it up on Snopes!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Back in my day, we didn't even have days. We only had hours, minutes, and, on rare occasions, seconds.
I recall hearing a story of a giant, rack mountable hard drive mounted at the top of a rack and someone writing code to seek the drive back and forth until the rack toppled.
A few days ago I took apart one of the first barracuda disks (broken) and found, besides the 10 plates (beauty!) and some interesting parts of more or less unknown purpose, two extremely strong magnets for moving the head. The magnets are really strong and the drives can be bought dirt cheap or even for free.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Good luck with it feds... If you can move it.... and you can prove that the 1 mp3 on it, is illegal and that i downloaded it.... You deserve my taxes.
How does "modern software/data file type bloat" account for the fact that a single image from my digital camera would need two of these drives? Oh right - it doesn't. The fact is that back then 4.4mb was plenty enough for any purpose that could be envisaged. People simply hadn't though of digital imaging, video or audio. Most of the spreadsheets or text documents on my HD are still in the 10's of kbytes whilst most of the FLAC or AVI files are in the 10's or 100's of mbytes. And this isn't because of inefficiency, current media-oriented data types are typically exceptionally space efficient (they have to be as people want to pull them over the net all the time).
I'm so fed up of people who cry about bloat all the time simply because hardware specs are going up when the reality is we do more with computers now than we used to. Or at least we can, if you're happy with a 80 column mono terminal and what it can do for you then that's great.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Okay, well, they're $30... but what's $10 between friends?
My blog
Whoa, hang on a second. Five megabytes is the same storage as a nice two-volume set of hardcover books. Seek time of 600 milliseconds is only one order of magnitude less than the time it takes me to look up something in an index.
And the cost? Maybe a buck or two for the books, compared to 3200 per month in 1956.
So what advantage do these suckers have over a couple of big books, even in 1956?
If the "seek time" advantage is so crucial, use a RAID-0 system. Get ten girls from the typing pool to look through 10 books, giving you 10 answers at a time. It'll still cost less than $3200 per month.
...of angular momentum, that is. Wouldn't want to be near when a bearing seized on one of those.
There has been a photo of this thing on Wikipedia since January 2005. There is even information on how to program the darned thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC
How long till Microsoft dema^H^H^H^H requests they add an SD card slot on the side so it can handle an install of Windows?
Perhaps before 1970 relatively few people had seen one. There would be one per organization in some central shrine. When DEC came along computers started to decentralize into departments and more people would see them at work. Home PCs and game machines came along in the late 1970s.
The symbol of the computer was the tape drive and blinking light console. Those would be the I/O devices you see on a tour beacuse the drives occupied the bulk of the floor area. The real programmers used punchcards and the lineprinter, but visitors didnt see those. You'd have to submit year punchcard decks to the submission desk and your printout would appear one to eight hours later. If your program was to be used a lot you could store it on disk. But that usually cost more than recompiling it. Maybe you'd get a funny-money budget of $500 a project or class. A compilation would cost a dollar a minute, or a few bucks. Disk storage was something like $1 a kilobyte per month. Most users were programmers. You might get a clerk assistant who prepare data on punch cards, put the data into the card deck, submit jobs and analyze printouts. The clerk didnt have to know too much about programming.
The big fear was that "automation" would make your job obsolete and you be on the streets.
Not to date myself, but boy that brings back memories. I started in this business in the mid 1960s a decade after this IBM disk. We used magnetic drums and head-per-track disks for storage. That makes the IBM unit with moving heads truly advanced for 1956. But what a dog it was at 600 ms seek time! Thats milliseconds guys, not microseconds. Six tenths of a second just to move the head.
The drum memories I used had one head per track, as did the head-per-track disks. In that case, seek time is zero (for head movement.) One need only wait for the latency time for the bytes you want to rotate under the head. Depending on rotation speed, latency could be as much as 5 to 15 milliseconds.
The amusing part, when I think back on it, was the way that the hardware design influenced the programming. Suppose you had a clause that looked like: IF X THEN A ELSE B ENDIF. To make your program run as fast as possible, you would arrange it so that the instructions for A and for B would reside on two different tracks at the same azimuthal angle, (right behind the instructions to evaluate IF X.) That way, no matter whether the branch evaluated true or false, one didn't have to wait for additional memory latency to read the next instruction.
We also didn't have room in RAM (core memory or registers at that time) to store data or calculated results. We had as few as 24 bytes of RAM. Thus, each data value also had to be assigned an address on the drum or disk. The location of that address relative to the code which accessed the value had a dramatic impact on program speed.
Therefore, to optimize programs for running speed, we spent more time devising optimum ways to store the code and data fragments on the drum or disk, than we did designing the functionality of the code. What language and OS did we use? No language, just program the instructions one bit at a time. No OS.
So what fancy apps did we do with this spaghetti software? We did real time control of power plants, both conventional and nuclear. We made flight simulators. We supported the Apollo project to send a man to the moon.
Despite the fact that the computers of those days were as much as 10,000 to 100,000 times slower than today's hardware, the real time applications were only 10 to 100 times slower and/or of lesser scope compared to today's apps. It was because of the extreme squeeze-blood-out-of-a-stone coding methods we used in those days.
For a really good story, get someone to write about how they streamed instructions sequences from earth to the Lunar Excursion Module for Apollo 11. Not streaming video, not music but streaming the code to execute. Buy the time one machine instruction would finish, the next one would be received and read to go. It was just-in-time delivery of the next instruction. That way, they needed no onboard mass storage of any kind. In my book, that was programming heroics that any slashdotter should appreciate.
It's a filing cabinet.
...when people are going to stop being impressed with "how far we've come."
but will it blend?
At Perot Systems where I worked most of this year, there's a courtyard containing many historical computer artifacts including one of these 305 disk cabinets. For contrast the curator of the "museum" placed a 40GB iPod (with the cover removed) within the case and there's a side by side comparison chart at the base of the cabinet. I forget all the statistics but it compared weight, cost, power consumption and of course, amount of data stored: 305 = 1 song, iPod = 2,000 songs. The actual character storage was extrapolated to provide more impressive numbers as well.
It made me curious whether or not it would run if it were connected today. I'd wager it would, but it would take some of the other machines in the museum to talk to it.
Perhaps you are not aware, but these disks could write also. How are you going to get 10 girls to update random locations continuously in those two books all concurrently? That's a lot of whiteout.
Linux is not likely to operate on that hardware due to incompatibility between our 8 bit characters and the 7 bit characters. Wow, have we finally found something that cannot support Linux?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
While I was working for an AeroSpace Sub-contractor in 72/73 we built prototype 38 inch removable HD platters for IBM.
These were built using different core materials (mag V honeycomb) and various bonding materials/techniques.
I don't know if they ever went into production, since I joined the Army before the project was finished.
There I learned to operate a 258lb portable computer - powered by a towed generator - that had 12k of core memory and a 8-level paper tape reader.
"Total domination is bad. The Microsoft dominance already badly misled people about how to choose systems. Instead of 'what tool do I use for the job' it's 'well it was shipped with the box'. Linux is a tool, Windows is a tool and so are numerous other systems. It's really important people go back to looking for the right tool for the job. That will never always be Linux. No single tool can do everything well." Alan Cox
My first paid job in computing was on mainframes. This was mid 1980s.
In those days, mainframe disks were removable with 3 platters and a whopping 200 MB. I remember seeing an engineer with his foot in a cast because the disc pack fell on it.
The mainframe I worked on had fixed disks that came in pairs, each with 500MB (half a Gigabyte). The site had 3GB total (6 disks, each the size of a big washing machine).
Last week I was amazed when I bought a 2GB microSD card for my phone that cost some 30$ and was smaller than my thumbnail.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Grandpa ... is that you?
... ROFLMAO!!!
Now tell them the story about walking to school barefoot in the snow, five miles, uphill, both ways
"Congress should definitely consider decriminalizing possession of marijuana....We should concentrate on prosecuting the rapists and burglars who are a menace to society." U.S. Representative Dan Quayle, March 1977
"That's what I get for marrying a Whore." Gary M. Carrington - 1983
They are the size of a nickel and cost less than 25 bucks:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820141250
Or go for 4GB and $35:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211197
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
In the year of Woodstock, 1969, memory for a PDP-8 was about $5000 for 4096 12-bit words of memory. In todays $ that would be a $3 a byte. This was magnetic core memory so you could power off and not have to reload. What's memory now -- less than $1 for 10 Mbytes. Ah those were the days.
and still faster and holds more than any drive built by Crappy Commode-ore.
A couple hours later he was found with a large bottle of MEK (Methyl-Ethyl Ketone, a popular cleaner at the time) and a packet of 0000 steel wool. The top three disks were very shiny, he'd gotten all that brown crap off them.
First person I ever heard fired on an intake of breath.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
...I have a disk platter from (I think) an ICL 475, mid-70's vintage. I remember that the motors for the drive heads were the size of cylinders in a medium-size car. This technology was, compared to the IBM, a marvel of miniaturisation: one platter held a full ten megabytes. The platter is, however, about 2.5 feet in diameter.
I once met an engineer who had worked on developing these hard drives. As an interesting tidbit, he informed me that the drives had to be housed in a special room with reinforced walls. The reinforcement was necessary because the drives would occasionally spin wild and throw a platter with sufficient force to go through regular drywall construction.
while i did start out on punchcards & punchtape, my 1st job in the early 70s was maintaining fortranIV code that had been migrated, via fII, from the codes they developed on their ibm drum memory machines...and there were variables named for drum mem. locations...no way was i gonna change those;-) o, yeah, another thing: the clarity of the code was inversely proportional to the brilliance of the coder, an u had 2 b brilliant 2 squeeze both speed & capability into those babies;-)
Explores not only the birth of the hard drive, but its future. A few years old, but very informative!
(Load the pdf version if you have the time - it is formatted just like that article appeared in the magazine)
Back in the mid 1970s, IBM did a storage presentation for the company where I worked. The presenter had been part of the team that engineered those first platters. He told an interesting story about their very first effort.
The setup was a large aluminum platter mounted on an ordinary record player turntable with the speed set on 78 RPM. Several technicians were standing around it in their clean white lab coats as the turntable came up to speed. The idea was to suspend iron oxide in a paint base and pour it onto the platter near the center, letting the centrifugal force spread the slurry out toward the rim. This should, in theory, yield a thin, uniform coating.
Our presenter held a Dixie cup full of slurry over the center of the platter and glanced around at his associates. They all nodded and he proceeded to pour out the contents of the Dixie cup. As he told it, "At that point, we all looked down at the brown stripe across all of our nice clean lab coats and decided that maybe we should turn the speed down to 45 RPM."
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
There is a Ramac in the lobby of the IBM Almaden Research Center south of San Jose in California. If for any reason you get to go inside the lab, there is also one of the early experimental engineering testbeds in a hallway, with seek mechanisms, platters, etc. This thing was used to determine whether the technology would work. According to a card sitting next to the testbed, the early experimental coating was the same paint that was being used at the time on the Golden Gate Bridge (apparently contains iron oxide), filtered through women's nylon stockings onto the spinning platter! I wonder who filed the expense accounting for the stockings.
I also notice that the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center claims to be restoring a Ramac and has made progress getting one running.
As noted in passing above, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA has an IBM 305 RAMAC on display. This RAMAC is in process of being restored to working condition as noted here. The restoration process, as documented on the magnetic disk heritage club club web page, seems to have been rather lengthy and meandering -- not surprising for a volunteer-run project that has moved multiple times and had changing personnel. Some interesting photos, schematics, and wave-forms are in the PDF progress reports at the sjmdhc site.
go slit your fucking wrists fucktard
The IBM 350 cabinet was 60x68x29 inches and the drive had a 4.4MB capacity.
My Sony Micro Vault Tiny USB drive is 1 1/4 x 9/16 x 1/8 inches and has a 4GB capacity.
9/16 of the 1 1/4 inch length is plug. But ignoring that, the USB drive is 1.2 billion times more space efficient than the IBM 350.
Equivalently, an IBM 350-size cabinet with a capacity of almost 5.4 petabytes would be as space efficient as the USB drive - and somewhat harder to misplace.