The IBM 305 RAMAC, which debuted in 1956, was the first computer with a hard drive. It was 16 square feet, weighed over a ton, and had to be transported by plane. But it sure as Hell beat punch cards.

NEW YORK, N.Y.—Built around the IBM disc memory, a random access memory unit has a storage capacity of 5,000,000 digits. Any of these digits can be reached directly without scanning through ...

A punched card was once the basis for digital information used for computer programs and data storage. They were widely used throughout the first half of the 20th century in processing machines to ...

Although the mainstay of the device (storage) to store data is shifting from the magnetic disk type HDD to the SSD using the flash memory, the magnetic disk type storage device has been in storage for ...

Learning from the market's past to understand its present. The 305 RAMAC was rented to businesses in need of real-time accounting for a monthly fee of $3,200, which would amount to approximately ...

Learning from the market's past to understand its present. One of the key events in IBM's market-thrashing transformation into a modern computing pioneer took place on this day in 1958. IBM's 305 ...

The image is a hard disk drive withonly 5 MBof storage (we get 16 GB + nowadays in our USB memory sticks—that’s 3,200 of these 1956 hard drives!) The good news was that it replaced punch cards 1 ...

Hard disk drives sure have come a long way, baby. In the 1950s, storage hardware was measured in feet—and in tons. Back then, the era’s state-of-the-art computer drive was found in IBM’s RAMAC 305; it ...

It was the first commercial computer to feature a hard disk drive. The IBM 350 disk storage unit stored about 5 MB of data on 50 24-inch disks. The 305 RAMAC with the 350 leased for $3,200/month.

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. In the 1950s, IBM introduced a random ...

The first hard drive, from 1956, was housed in a computer the size of two refrigerators. But in less than a quarter of the century, engineers shrunk hard drives to 5. ...