Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
The First Hard Drive
By James Grahame
IBM developed a gigantic 5 MB hard drive system for their RAMAC computer in 1956. Just imagine trying to cram this thing into an iPod. Or your house, for that matter...
"Information is stored, magnetically, on fifty disks which rotate at 1200 rpm. These disks are mounted so as to rotate about a vertical axis, with a spacing of three tenths of an inch between disks. This spacing permits two magnetic heads to be positioned to any one of the 100 concentric tracks which are available on each side of each disk. Each track contains 500 alphanumeric characters. Total storage capacity: 5,000,000 characters. The two recording heads are mounted in a pair of arms which are moved, by a feed-back control system, in a radial direction to straddle a selected disk. This new system promises memory storage possibilities never before accomplished."
