IBM unveiled the world's first hard disc 50 years ago
this week.
The IBM 350 disc storage unit was rolled out in 1956 as part of
the IBM 305 Ramac business computer. It offered storage capacities
of five, 10, 15 or 20 million characters and was configured with 50
magnetic discs containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100
alphanumeric characters.
At the launch event on 14 September 1956, then IBM president
Thomas J Watson Jr said, "Today is the greatest new product day in
the history of IBM and, I believe, in the history of the office
equipment industry.
These products provide the most significant advancement toward
business control and operation by electronics to be made thus far."
The monthly charge for the IBM 305 Ramac was £1,700.
Data density (the amount of information that can be squeezed
into a square inch of hard disc space) had increased 65 million
times since 1956, according to drive manufacturer Seagate. Today, a
pocket-sized device using a single one-inch platter can store
12Gbytes of information.
Seagate predicted that by 2020 a one-inch platter would be able
to hold 500 million pages of text.