50 years of Hard discs

On this day 50 years ago IBM unveiled its RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting Machine). A computer machine which weighed several tonnes & occupied the same space as a bunch of fridge freezers. It was the first hard drive which could be searched & accessed without starting from the "beginning" of the data flow & running to the end, such as one must do with a magnetic tape.

Between 13/9/56 and its withdrawl from the market in the mid 1960's IBM sold over 6,000 of the units each of which could store 5 megabytes of information.

A lot has changed in the last 50 years.

If you don't really know what has changed it's time you learnt what a megabyte is.

Your mobile phone might, but your neighbour's kid's MP3 definitely will have more memory.

And today IBM announced the arrival of a supercomputer which will see the first "petaflop" - one billion operations per second.

within 50 years that will be normal consumer thinking power.