Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Storage
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

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

'The whole atmosphere was like a start-up,' recalls one veteran

September 13, 2006 12:00 PM ET

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.

Click here to view the slide show
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.

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.



Jump to comments

Disk Drive anniversary

Additional Resources

Microsoft
Here are some of the key reasons why you would want to run Unified Access Gateway with DirectAccess.
Microsoft
Review how one energy firm tightened protection and simplified IT work using business-ready security solutions.
Sybase
In this white paper, IDC analyzes the role of next-generation mobile enterprise platforms as organizations seek a more strategic deployment of mobile solutions.

Learn the important issues you must consider before starting your next mobility initiative. Get your mobility white paper from IDC now, compliments of Sybase.

White Papers & Webcasts

Cache Tier Memory Efficiency with Gear6 Web Cache
Download this valuable white paper!  

Connecting to the Cloud with F5 and VMware VMotion
F5 and VMware partner to enable live application and storage migrations between datacenters and clouds, over short or long distances.  

Virtualize Microsoft Applications on VMware
Register for this live webcast now!

F5 Virtualization Guide: Seven Key Challenges You Can't Ignore
Seven Key Challenges You Can't Ignore  

Strategic ECM Webinar
Learn what new strategic business benefits can be realized through ECM!


IT Jobs

 

Partnered Content
Hitachi - Inspire the Next
Storage Economics: Understanding Tiered Storage Solutions
Storage Economics is a suite of methodologies, tools, and services that help customers identify the total cost of storage ownership and provide a tiered storage solution to reduce ongoing costs. Understand the benefits of implementing a tiered storage architecture which include improving storage capacities and easing the access demands to any single storage tier. Learn more.
Download this white paper 
Strategies for an Increasingly Cost-Conscious Data Storage World
Whatever word you use, we can all agree that the global economy continues to face challenging times. Yet, the essential challenge remains the same: IT demands continue to increase but the resources to address such challenges are being flattened or cut. However, we truly have an opportunity here to do more with less and focus on efficiency. Hitachi can help. Learn more.
Download this white paper 
Four Principles to Reduce TCO
Yes, good news! The good news is that there are proven strategic investments available today for storage infrastructure cost reduction. Smart organizations will follow the principles of Storage Economics to evaluate them not just for their technical prowess but also for how well they can support business performance and particularly efforts to economize. Learn more.
Download this white paper