Today in History: 1956 IBM introduces the RAMAC 305, 1st commercial computer with a hard drive that uses magnetic disk storage
In 1956, the day after the IBM ® 305 RAMAC computer was announced, The San Jose Mercury News ran a story under the headline, “A machine with super memory!” The story noted: “The information on the discs can be added to, altered or erased at will. Card-sorting, one of the most time consuming office-machine processes, is eliminated or greatly reduced.”
RAMAC was the first computer to use a random-access disk drive—the 350 Disk Storage Unit—the progenitor of every hard disk drive made in the 55 years since. But the impact of the 350 Disk Storage Unit was more than that: It introduced the concept of instantly accessible information. Before RAMAC, information had to be entered by running a stack of cards through a punched card machine, and answers would arrive in hours or days. RAMAC could find data in seconds, alter it, and move on to find a completely different piece of data. It let enterprises think about data in new ways, mixing and matching it on the fly. Random access made the relational database possible.
The idea of some kind of magnetic, quickly accessed memory had been around since the late 1940s. Small companies like Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, developed magnetic drum storage. These rotating drums were reliable but slow. An Wang, who built the word processing giant Wang Laboratories, developed an early technology that made magnetic core memory possible. Those devices of wires and tiny magnets had quick access times but couldn’t hold much information. They couldn’t replace tape or punched cards, but were used as short-term memory for early computers—the predecessors to the solid-state memory of later DRAM chips.
In 1952, with computer excitement in the air, IBM sent Reynold Johnson to San Jose to start a new research lab. When the Air Force wanted a random access inventory system, Johnson set his 50-person lab in motion, trying everything—strips, rods, tapes, flat plates, you name it. In the early 1950s, no one had any idea how to make a fast, reliable random access memory machine.
The technical obstacles were enormous. The lab soon settled on using spinning, horizontal disks coated with magnetic material. Magnetic spots on the disk would represent a character of data. Since the spots would have a magnetic field, a magnetic arm, like a record needle, could hover over the spots and read them as the disks rotated at high speed. But the first challenge was finding material for the disks. The disks had to be perfectly flat, strong and light enough to be spun by a reasonable-size electric motor. A single aluminum disk warped at high speeds. After much trial-and-error, the researchers tried gluing two aluminum disks together. It worked.
Even more problematic was the arm. It could never touch the disk or it would wipe out the data. Two researchers, William Goddard and John Lynott, came up with an arm that fired out compressed air to hover just above the disk. “When we concluded we could do that, we could see a fairly clear road to building a practical random access memory,” said Louis Stevens, a senior engineer at the San Jose lab.
Since a single disk could not store enough data to be useful, the researchers built a machine that held 16 disks stacked horizontally, with a tiny space between each disk. “We called it a jukebox and a meat cutter and a lot of other things,” Johnson said. To disbelieving executives at headquarters, it was known as the baloney slicer.
The jukebox set-up left the San Jose team with one other challenge: how to get that arm to the right place on the right disk in the blink of an eye. Said Johnson: “That was our goal, to go from any track which was six inches in on a disk, out, down, two feet to the bottom, and in six inches—in half a second. We achieved something like 800 milliseconds and that’s where the product came out. It was really an amazing achievement.”
The product as it was introduced was the size of two kitchen refrigerators side by side. Fifty disks inside spun at 1200 revolutions per minute, while the arm dashed in and out, accessing the data at about 100,000 bits per second. The whole thing could store 5 million binary decimal encoded characters at 7 bits per character—in other words, about the contents of a Manhattan, New York, phone book. Each character could be read or changed randomly, in any order, at any time, making the machine a revelation. Hugo Cannizzaro was selling out of IBM’s San Francisco office at the time. “It was the first time I had customers insisting that I come to their offices immediately so they could place an order,’’ he said.
At the time, thanks to the success of the early Univac computer, the suffix “AC” was a popular tech branding them—like the prefix “e-”in the dot-com era. The researchers called their computer Random Access Memory-AC, or RAMAC. The IBM marketers liked RAMAC, but changed it to mean Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. The 350 Disk Storage Unit was the key feature of a whole accounting system. More than 1000 RAMAC 305 systems were built, but the number belies the effect on the market. RAMAC was the beginning of the end of ubiquitous punched cards, and the start of a nearly six-decade drive for real-time information.
Read more of the story here
Also on this day:
1716 1st lighthouse in American colonies lit at Boston Harbour
1741 George Frideric Handel finishes his “Messiah” oratorio after working on it non-stop for 23 days
1752 Britain and the British Empire (including the American colonies) adopt the Gregorian Calendar (no Sept 3 - Sept 13)
1812 Great Fire of Moscow begins as Napoleon approaches the city and retreating Russians burn it - fire continues to burn for five days
1814 Francis Scott Key pens the poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry”, later known as “The Star-Spangled Banner” while witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a ship in Baltimore harbour
1847 US Marines under General Scott enter Mexico City (halls of Montezuma)
1867 Karl Marx publishes “Das Kapital” Volume 1, his theory of the Capitalist system and how it is doomed to destroy itself
1899 Henry Bliss becomes 1st automobile fatality in the US (NY)
1901 Theodore Roosevelt is sworn in as the youngest man to serve as US President, after William McKinley dies after an anarchist shoots him in Buffalo
1905 RAC Tourist Trophy race first run on Isle of Man
1914 Lord Kitchener: “Your country needs you” appears as front cover design for the London Opinion magazine
1918 WWI: Austria-Hungary sends a note to the Allies requesting peace discussions, but the Allies reject the offer
1936 1st prefrontal lobotomy in America performed by Walter Freeman and James W. Watts at George Washington University Hospital in Washington D.C.
1938 Graf Zeppelin II, world’s largest airship, makes its maiden flight
1939 World’s 1st practical helicopter, the VS-300 designed by Igor Sikorsky takes (tethered) flight in Stratford, Connecticut
1948 Ground-breaking ceremony for UN world headquarters in New York
1957 UN resolution deplores & condemns USSR invasion of Hungary
1957 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
1958 Two rockets designed by the German engineer Ernst Mohr, the first German post-war rockets, reach the upper atmosphere.
1959 Soviet Union’s Luna-2 is 1st spacecraft to land on the Moon
1960 Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi-Arabia and Venezuela form the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
1975 Rembrandt’s oil painting “The Night Watch” slashed & damaged by an unemployed schoolteacher, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
1985 “The Golden Girls”, starring Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty, debuts on NBC
2000 Microsoft Launches Windows ME
2017 Bodleian Library reveals earliest evidence of the zero symbol in 3rd or 4th Century Bakhshali (Pakistan) manuscript, through carbon dating
2020 Astronomers report possible sign of life on Venus, after detecting phosphine in planet’s atmosphere by telescope
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1959 Morten Harket - Norwegian rocker (Aha - “Take On Me”), born in Kongsberg, Norway
1947 Sam Neill - New Zealand actor (Jurassic Park, Dead Calm, The Piano), born in Omagh, Northern Ireland
1936 Walter Koenig - American actor (Star Trek, Babylon 5), born in Chicago, Illinois
1910 Jack Hawkins - British actor (Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur Just Men, Zulu, Malta Story), born in London, England
1769 Alexander von Humboldt - German naturalist and explorer (Kosmos), born in Berlin, Germany
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2021 Norm MacDonald - Canadian stand-up comedian, writer, and actor (Saturday Night Live, 1993-98; Dirty Work; The Norm Show)
1982 Grace Kelly - princess of Monaco, dies in a car crash at 52
1852 Arthur Wellesley - Duke of Wellington and British Prime Minister (Tory: 1828-30)
1715 Dom Pérignon - French-Benedictine monk who helped improve the quality of champagne
1321 Dante Alighieri - Italian poet and author (Dante’s Inferno, The Divine Comedy)
Holidays on this day
Eat a Hoagie Day
Gobstopper Day
Live Creative Day
National Colouring Day
National Cream Filled Donut Day
National Quiet Day (UK)
National Sober Day
Support Latino Business Day
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
The Funnies:
On the Menu Today – Cocoa Salmon
This looks delicious, and given how easy it is, will be on my menu tonight, given that I already have all the ingredients! I’ll let you know how it tastes tomorrow (if I remember)!
Today’s dish courtesy of CookingLight
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons cane sugar
- 1 tablespoon paprika
- 1 tablespoon chili powder
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon dry mustard
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 4 (6-oz) pieces salmon
- 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Method
- Heat a grill to medium-high.
- In small bowl, stir together the sugar, paprika, chili powder, salt, cocoa powder, mustard, black pepper, and cayenne until combined thoroughly. Reserve 3 tablespoons for this recipe and set the rest aside for another use.
- Using a pastry brush, brush the salmon with the oil to thoroughly coat all sides. Sprinkle the 3 tablespoons of spice blend evenly over the salmon, using about 2 teaspoons per piece and coating them well. Let rest for 5 minutes.
- Put the fillets on the grill and cook until just cooked through, about 3 minutes each side, or until done to your liking.
Quote of the Day:
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
- Bruce Lee
Video of the Day:
Happy birthday Morten Harket! Thought I’d play something different to Take On Me!
Comic of the Day:
Mouseover: “Sure, taking a few seconds to be respectful toward someone about something they care about doesn’t sound hard. But if you talk to hundreds of people every day and they all start expecting that same consideration, it could potentially add up to MINUTES wasted. And for WHAT?”
Image Credit: xkcd: Slippery Slope
Explain XKCD: 1332: Slippery Slope - explain xkcd
Inspirobot Always Controversial, Occasionally Inspirational Quote of the Day:
Read @vikingmichael 's sculpted Spark! from yesterday here . Don’t forget to leave some spice!
