M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 6
by Charles Sebastian, Staff Writer
The year is 1956. The quest
for a better and more capacious
means of data storage has been
the focus of many companies of
the time. The realization that
memory could actually be stored
magnetically was somewhat of a
new idea. The recording method
was not unknown in the sense
that celluloid and Bakelite had
been able to capture images and
sounds for a long time in a “play
back exactly what you recorded”
fashion. When magnetic strips
were added to film in the late
1920s, sound mixed with image
was born. When The Jazz Singer
starring Al Jolson first appeared
in 1927, people were shocked
and exhilarated that such a device could exist.
The difference with International Business Machine’s (IBM)
first model, the 305 RAMAC
(Random Access Memory Accounting), was that it used a binary system of 1s and 0s for storing large amounts of pure data.
This method was later shortened
to Random Access Memory
(RAM), which is what most of
us are familiar with today.
The big value of IBM’s September 1956 achievement was
that companies could store lots
of data and eliminate the need
for paper and the storage space
to contain it. The other beneficial aspect was the immediate retrieval of information. This used
to take days or weeks and cost a
company a lot of money; it even
led to bankruptcy in many cases.
The information would be given to the person requesting it on
either printed or punched cards.
A film IBM produced at the time
discusses the difficulty the company had getting the magnetic
substance to stick and lay evenly
so it could encode properly. Finally, one of the engineers came
up with the idea of pouring the
substance onto the disk while it
was spinning like a record horizontally. You can view the short
film at https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=6coKh7vtpsY.
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IBM went through many other
models during the remainder of
the 1950s while other companies tried desperately to jump on
the bandwagon and be competitive. The models were finally
discontinued in 1969 after they
had gone through a great deal
of streamlining. The actual 350
body was huge, not something
you would want in your living
room. Like radios, televisions
and other electronics, things
kept getting smaller and easier
for the public to use. When
production of the 350 RAMAC
ended in 1961, the world was
already on its way to the smaller,
more portable computers we
have today. These computers
all are rooted in the 305. It was
one of the last vacuum-tube
machines IBM built. As tubes
went out of style and transistors
came on board in the 1960s,
many engineers and electricians
had to make the jump into this
new world, which allowed for
many more possibilities: more
data storage, faster movement of
information and more compact
structures.
We would be in a much different world, one absent Bill Gates
and Microsoft, one absent Steve
Jobs and Apple, had IBM not
launched this machine 60
years ago.
When magnetic
strips were
added to film in
the late 1920s,
sound mixed
with image
was born.
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