Extraordinary Photos From History Explained

Like it? Share it!

Facebook

Pinterest

Reddit

Twitter

Google+

Big Tech

Boredomfiles

This is a photo of a 5MB hard drive being loaded onto a Pan-Am flight in 1956. A year earlier, IBM announced a product that would offer unprecedented random-access storage — which was the equivalent of 5 million characters. This disk drive would signal the end of sequential storage on punched cards and paper or Mylar tape, though the tape would still be used for archival or backup storage. This product would be known as the RAMAC, which stood for “random access method of accounting and control”, occupied the space of two refrigerators and weighed about a ton. The 5 million characters were stored on 50 aluminum disks coated with magnetic iron oxide on both sides, which was a variation of the paint primer used for the Golden Gate Bridge.