Talk about Laptops

And the capacity? 5 MB. That’s right. But that was more than half a century ago. This is the world’s first hard drive. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

These disks are mounted so as to rotate about a vertical axis, with a spacing of three tenths of an inch between disks. This spacing permits two magnetic heads to be positioned to any one of the 100 concentric tracks which are available on each side of each disk. Each track contains 500 alphanumeric characters. Total storage capacity: 5,000,000 characters. The two recording heads are mounted in a pair of arms which are moved, by a feed-back control system, in a radial direction to straddle a selected disk.

Now compare this to the prototype protein based DVDs and USB Drives that may hold upto 50 Terabyte of Data. That is about 10 million times more space. Talk about technological advancement!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.