Today we do not imagine what things were like in the past, but we have in mind how, for example, a hard drive is something smaller and easier to handle, however, there was a day when the first one was created, and it was precisely not very similar to what you are imagining. Today you can carry a flash drive with 1,000 videos in your pants, of those you could not carry a single one without someone’s help.
Its creator was IBMin the year 1956, and they named it Ramac I.
Bigger than a fridge
Yes, what you read, it was bigger and heavier than a fridge. It was exactly 1.52m wide and 1.72m tall, and its weight exceeded the 1,000kg. A real barbarity.
Its mechanism was not simple either, mechanical arms moved the discs to gather and read the information. It was made up of 50 of these, composed of aluminum and iron oxide.
5MB capacity
Exactly, it had a capacity that today would not even serve us to store 2 songs, and yet, it weighed more than 5,000 mobile phones together.
You will then wonder what it was used for. Well, it turns out that, although it seems to us very little memory, 5mb was used to store about 5 million characters, and the machine managed to access all of them in approximately half a second, so for the time (1956) it was a great achievement. Imagine a doctor being able to consult all of his guide, even if it was only with words. Of course, anyone imagines that hulking in a query. But you can imagine its utilities, when that one did not exist nor had they tried anything else.
Its release on the market was brutal, especially for large companies that wanted to access their data in that easy way at that time. It was a complete computer, not just the disk, and rented for $3,200 a month. An outrage that even so had more than 1,000 customers in those early years.
Before his invention, data storage was done on punched cards and magnetic tape, which was extremely slow and required a lot of space.
In short, the first Ramac I hard drive was not only an important 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 the use of external devices, but if it hadn’t been for inventions like this, you probably wouldn’t be reading this here today.
