{"id":2473,"date":"2006-07-31T15:18:47","date_gmt":"2006-07-31T15:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2473"},"modified":"2006-07-31T15:18:47","modified_gmt":"2006-07-31T15:18:47","slug":"the_hard_disk_t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2473","title":{"rendered":"The Hard Disk That Changed the World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/14096484\/site\/newsweek\/\">Steven Levy<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue&#8217;s San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you&#8217;d pay about $250,000 a year in today&#8217;s dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving &#8220;heads&#8221; that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks&mdash;each of them a pizza-size 24 inches&mdash;was 5 megabytes. That&#8217;s not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley&#8217;s &#8220;Hound Dog.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Yet those who beheld the RAMAC were astonished. &#8220;It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running,&#8221; recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-&#8217;50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM. &#8220;It really turned the tide [in the Information Age],&#8221; he says. &#8220;It was the first to offer random access, whereas before you would have to wind a tape from one end to the other to access data.&#8221;<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Levy: The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue&#8217;s San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you&#8217;d pay about $250,000 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}