From Elvis' hips to spinning disk: 50 years of innovation

Computerworld - Fifty years ago this week, with "Hound Dog" climbing the music charts, Elvis Presley made his first scandalously hip-gyrating appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. But something much bigger was about to shake up the world. A small lab in a sleepy orchard town was delivering the first of what we now know -- more than 2 billion units later -- as a hard disk drive.

Al Hoagland, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the 18 or so people in the mid-1950s working for IBM in San Jose on the Random Access Method for Accounting Control, or RAMAC. IBM had started the facility there to take advantage of aerospace professionals in Seattle and Los Angeles who didn't want to move to the East Coast, he said. Because of the distance, lab head Rey Johnson had a free hand, Hoagland said.

RAMAC pioneers; Al Hoagland, Jack Grogan and Lou Stevens

"The whole atmosphere was like a start-up, with IBM putting in the funds but nothing else," Hoagland said. "It's probably as true an example as any of not knowing what you were doing when you arrived, and, four years later, announcing a product that totally impacted computing in the world."

The group wasn't afraid to try new ideas, such as developing a magnetic system using paint with ferrite filings in it -- similar to the paint used on the nearby Golden Gate Bridge -- spread evenly using the centrifugal force of a spinning disk, and filtered through women's hose to remove the clumps, Hoagland said.

Click here to view the 50 Years of the Hard Drive slide show

That first RAMAC drive is thought to have gone to the San Francisco office of Crown Zellerbach, the world's second-largest paper company at the time. Like Hoagland, Jim Porter had originally ended up in San Jose, "but I decided it was a terrible place for a young man to start a business career, unless he wanted to pick prunes or apricots." The company, where he worked in marketing at the time, used the device for keeping track of sales, employee records, payrolls and inventories, he said.

Porter remembers that the computer room where the RAMAC was stored was three levels below Market Street. He said the disk system's head assembly moved "in and out and all over, and [had] a glass front so you could see what was going on."

By chance, after Porter left Crown Zellerbach in 1964, he went to work for other companies that were taking advantage of storage technology, including Memorex Products Inc. and Cartridge Television Inc., which made Cartrivision, the first VCR. "Movie moguls would say, 'Rent a movie? Are you out of your mind?'" he says. Zellerbach then moved on to CMX, a joint venture of CBS Corp. and Memorex, to develop a video editing system for $360,000 that was used by the CBS and NBC evening news. "Today, you can do everything CMX could do for $1,000 on a Macintosh," he said.