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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."
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.
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
...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.
Actually, the metric equivalent to a 'shitload' is the metric 'assload.' As in, 'That's an assload of storage!'
It's much easier to talk in terms of milliassloads, centiassloads, assloads, kiloassloads and mega-assloads than in shitloads; who can ever remember that one shitload=4 'whole piles of' = 7.46 'whole lotta's = 14.5 (14 even in certain states) 'whole buncha's = 31 'fair chunk of' which, finally, contains 252 'bitta's.
After all, isn't it easier to say 'there's 40 centiassloads of storage on that mem card' than 'there's a whole lotta and a bitta space on that mem card'?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.