Tedium - You Spin Me Right Round, Baby 📀

Today in Tedium: Hard drives may be the most fundamental building block of the computer revolution. Hitting the perfect balance between size and cost, it was a defining piece of computer history, one that made our machines more permanent and helped us rethink the way we store information. With a hard drive, we were eventually able to move away from the idea of thinking of our documents in terms of a linear order and a physical space. And that, of the many innovations that came from computing, might be the most important. Now, granted, it wasn’t easy to get to that point—in part because hard drives weren’t always the small, compact platters we have today. In fact, they were bigger. A lot bigger. Today’s Tedium talks early hard drives. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s Tedium is sponsored by the cloud security service Nightfall. More from them in a second.

Those platters are friggin’ huge, aren’t they? (California Digital Library)

The philosophy behind the first hard disk, which was made by IBM, of course

If you were to explain to the public what a hard drive was with no prior frame of reference, where would you start? How would you highlight the benefits to the world?

That’s an odd, somewhat theoretical problem today, but in 1956, it was legitimately a challenging problem that IBM had to solve. At the time, “business machines” often meant storing information on punch cards and and typewritten pages, which meant that the file cabinet business was doing quite well back in the day.

The difference between a punch card and a hard drive is quite similar to the difference between the Dewey Decimal System and microfilm—one organizes content that’s completely physical while the other shrinks the scale enough that it allows for some degree of rethinking how we access the content. With a hard disk, it doesn’t have to necessarily be in order anymore. It adds a layer of separation between you and the information being displayed.

In many ways, the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), which was initially built for the needs of accountants, represented this sort of abstraction. Designed at the behest of the U.S. Air Force, it was meant to provide faster, more efficient storage of information than magnetic drums.

“This has been a day of solid achievement,” the first message ever stored on a hard drive stated, according to a 2002 ComputerWorld article.

Upon its 1956 release, the mainframe machine was the first to allow for any form of hard disk storage, and while the 350 Disk Storage Unit was stored in a centralized place, it was not a tiny piece of technology, requiring very large spinning platters of around 24 inches in diameter—or twice the diameter of a full-size vinyl record. Per the company, a single platter could hold up to 5 million individual characters on a single disk—or, in other words, five megabytes.

Of course, IBM had to explain why an accounting team would actually want this, and they did so by comparing it to the paper-based ledger system originally used for bookkeeping, which was often quite cumbersome, could often lead to human errors. In a 1958 reference manual for the 305 RAMAC, the company described the benefits of an alternative approach called in-line processing. Explaining the approach using an example of a manufacturing company purchasing raw material, the company explained the benefits as such:

In the example just mentioned, the clerk changed the balances in the cash account and the raw material account. The next transaction could reflect the fact that some of the raw material had entered the manufacturing process, in which case the clerk would subtract this amount from the raw material account and add it to the material-in-process account.

However, it is more probable that the next transaction would affect entirely different accounts. Perhaps some of the finished products were sent to the wholesaler. This transaction would affect the inventory and accounts receivable balances.

Because the clerk has direct access to all of these accounts, he can complete the posting of each transaction before beginning the posting of the next. This accounting method is called in-line processing.

In-line processing has previously not been practical in automatic accounting systems because of the difficulty of reaching and changing single records in large files. However, with the introduction of the IBM 305 RAMAC which is built around a random-access disk storage unit that permits the storage of 5,000,000 characters of business facts (the equivalent of 62,500 80-column IBM cards), in-line processing is now a practical reality.

The platform, which relied on punch cards for both input and output, nonetheless allowed for a much more sophisticated form of storage than was previously possible.

A short promotional film about the RAMAC (which amusingly features the mainframe machine sitting next to standing water at one point) spoke to the same issues—featuring at one point an endless sea of filing cabinets—and described the development process, which revealed that research and development teams were directly inspired by both the properties of magnetic tape storage and the random scanning allowed by record players.

“But scanning tape to find a single fact takes time, unlike finding a place on a record,” the film explained.

A RAMAC disc platter gets coated. (YouTube screenshot)

So IBM, essentially, combined the two concepts—using magnetic data storage and making it possible to access the data randomly, like a vinyl record. Pretty cool, huh?

While the device might have been intended for accountants and other business-specific uses, it quickly found other contexts. For example, the U.S. Coast Guard used RAMAC to help with search and rescue missions, and the 1960 Winter Olympics relied on a RAMAC 305 to help score and immediately tabulate the results of a contest—something that had previously taken hours to do.

Ford even used the mainframe’s storage power to do some primitive market research on a small town called Flora, Illinois. In 1960, the company fed detailed survey data on the town’s roughly 5,000 people into a RAMAC, along with (of course, their opinions on the company’s 1961 line of vehicles.

“Every available statistic on Flora and its citizens will be recorded in the RAMAC. To the best of my knowledge, never before has the introduction of a new car been studied with such searching thoroughness,” said George H. Brown, the manager, of Ford’s market research division, in a 1960 Arizona Republic article.

And that’s what they did with a five-megabyte hard disk in 1960.