Today we do not imagine what things were like in the past, but we have in mind how, for example, a hard disk is something smaller and easier to handle, however, there is had a day when the first was created, and it was precisely not very similar to what you imagine. Today, you can carry a flash drive with 1,000 videos in your pants, ones you couldn’t carry around without someone’s help.
Its creator was IBMin 1956, and they named him Ramac I.
Bigger than a fridge
Yes, what you read was bigger and heavier than a fridge. It was exactly 1.52 m wide and 1.72 m high, and its weight exceeded the 1,000 kilograms. A real barbarism.
Its mechanism was not simple either, mechanical arms moved the discs to collect and read the information. It was made up of 50 of them, made of aluminum and iron oxide.
5MB capacity
Precisely, it had a capacity that today we would not even use to store 2 songs, and yet it weighed more than 5,000 cell phones together.
You will then wonder what it was used for. Well, it turns out that, although it seems like very little memory to us, 5MB was used to store about 5 million characters, and the machine managed to access each of them in about half a second , so for the time (1956) it was a great success. Imagine a doctor being able to consult his entire guide, even if it was only with words. Of course, anyone imagines it heavy in a query. But you can imagine its uses, when that one didn’t exist and they hadn’t tried anything else.
Its launch was brutal, especially for large companies who wanted to access their data in such a simple way at the time. It was a complete computer, not just the disk, and rented $3,200 per month. An outrage which nevertheless had over 1,000 customers in those early years.
Prior to its invention, data storage was done on punched cards and magnetic tape, which was extremely slow and took up a lot of space.
In short, the first Ramac I hard drive not only marked a milestone in the history of data storage technology, but also laid the foundation for smaller, faster and more efficient devices in the future. Today we already store almost everything in the cloud and we don’t need to use external devices, but if it hadn’t been for inventions like this you probably wouldn’t be reading this here Today.
