History 2002: First HDD Lab Turns 50

It was back in 1952, at 99 Notre Dame, San Jose, CA, in a building still standing today, that IBM first launched the lab that would produce the first HDD, the RAMAC 350 File, under the leadership of Rey Johnson, who passed away in 1998.

Today, nearly 200 million HDDs are produced yearly.

The device from that era, first shipped in 1956, weighed one ton, using 50 disks of 24 inches in diameter, spinning at 1,200rpm. The unit offered a mere 4.4MB user capacity, with areal density of 2,000 bits per square inch (compared to 70Gb today), corresponding to 100bpi and 20tpi. Average access time was 800ms. It cost roughly $11,000 per megabyte to obtain such a device.

To commemorate the anniversary, a celebration was held in San Jose on September 13 by the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center.

50 years after first coming up with the technology, and after a lifetime as a leader in the field, IBM sold the business to Hitachi. Not exactly cause for celebration.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 178 on November 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.