Saw this elsewhere and though it was cool.

It's said to be a model "350 Ramac", with a 5000 character (or about 3.75MB) capacity.

And to get 3TB worth of them - which now, a touch more than 60years later - is available in pocket sized drives - you would have needed about 750,000 of these massive units:



Pretty cool...

Really makes you think where we'll be in another 60 years. Thanks for the photo.

Just imagine how long it took to read all that data - all 3.75 MB of it!

It's huge!!! Hell, you could store 3.7 M "bites" of a ham sandwich in that chassis

"The first IBM drive, the 350 RAMAC, was approximately the size of two refrigerators and stored 5 million 6-bit characters (the equivalent of 3.75 million 8-bit bytes) on a stack of 50 discs."

https://www.ibm.com/developerw...t_on_storage?lang=en

Thats a big crowd too.

Replace the gawkers in that photo with sailors in dungarees, the old cars with '60's models and take the IBM sign off the cover and it would resemble the delivery of the Univac 9000 at North Island in 1969 that I supervised.

It had 2 tape drives the size of phone booths, 8k of memory, a printer, card punch and card reader. A moving van backed up to the big double doors to the data center and a group of men, all supervisors(!) hauled it in from the truck, with the customary confusion and sweating and swearing. It cost the Navy $50,000 I was told. I don't know if that included the special black box to interface between 8 bit bytes and 36 bit words.

One of my first job assignments after grad school was to do the cost analysis/justification for a removable hard drive on a DEC computer, used for a DoD contract. IIRC the cost was ~$25K, the capacity was 256 KB.

The quantum leap in technology just amazes me.

They really came a long way....when I was in my 20's I was installing 20MB hard drives that were the size of washing machines. We used to keep vacuum belts in our kits as they were belt drive and the belts broke all the time. If you picture a washing machine the writing was done on the outside of the cylindrical drum.

Back in the eighties and early nineties I worked on some large disk drives, just not that big.

One of the types I worked on was waist high, contained two disk drives with a capacity of 65Mb per spindle.

If the customer wanted to be able to swap the disks around to different drives the heads needed to be aligned on the drives. This involved using an alignment disk, an oscilloscope, voltmeter and run box.

Ah, the good old days of actually having to work on a computer. I enjoyed my job back then.

FFwd to the late 1980's.
We were selling Seagate 20mb kits w/ controller for around $400 as I recall > LIKE HOTCAKES!

I helped install a Control Data Corp. 3600 computer system at a Sandia Corp. site at Livermore, CA in the late 60's. The system included a Dataproducts disk drive, physically larger, and greater capacity. And it had to be pushed up a ramp like the one in the photo. And it cracked the ramp!

The drive had two vertical spindles, each with 12 (?) disks about 3' in diameter. The disks had to be cleaned occasionally. Plexiglass covers were removed, then a 3' wood rod, with alcohol-soaked gauze wrapped around one end, was pushed and pulled over the surface of the disks. The gauze soon had a reddish stain from loosened iron oxide.

Those Plexiglass covers were clear, so the movement of the head assemblies, operated by linear motors, could be observed. Very fast, yet precise – fascinating to watch.

I once sold the Sultan of Brunei a whopping 1MB of Kingston RAM...for $1200.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
<snip>I don't know if that included the special black box to interface between 8 bit bytes and 36 bit words.

Or maybe 6-bit bytes, plus a parity bit…

Other technology milestones: In 1997, it took just over an hour to download a 1MB file. Now, it takes less than a minute to download 1GB, which is 1000 times larger.

My first computer was a Univac with vacuum tubes. It was classified top-secret and I couldn't tell anyone where I worked or what I did.

The thing had vacuum tubes. I collect the old drives but I have not been able to get anything this big.
The move to transistors really was a game changer.

quote:

Originally posted by Lunasee:
It's huge!!! Hell, you could store 3.7 M "bites" of a ham sandwich in that chassis

You could probably toast that ham sandwich on the chassis, too.

In the early 90's I attended a Silicon Valley luncheon, the guest speaker was Bill Joy, cofounder and technical lead of Sun Microsystems.

He displayed a price/performance curve of computer technology since about 1955, and commented they felt the curve would continue at that rate, without any plateau, indefinitely. I didn't believe it, all technology reaches some sort of natural limit. So far he is correct.

Sidenote on Bill Joy. One year his staff at Sun dismantled a VW Bug, carried the parts into his office, and reassembled it. There was a surprise the next morning when he went to work.