Say goodbye to data on tapes and paper cards.
Here is the lightning fast magnetic drive with the colossal capacity of a whole 3,75 MEGAbyte and fully re-writable!
On September 14, 1956, IBM announced the IBM 350 disk storage unit.
Before the hard disk drive, users would have to switch tapes and wait until the data was found somewhere on the reel or had to find the right punch cards.
Both of which were hard or impossible to rewrite, while the magnetic disk would make rewrites almost a breeze
This flexibility along with the increased size of data storage and speed is why the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit is considered to be an important milestone in the history of computer storage and maybe even one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.
(Rivaled of course by the invention of sliced bread)
The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit had a storage capacity of 5 million characters, which is around 3.75 MB, using 50 24-inch disks that spun at the neck-break speed of1,200 rpm.
The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit was primarily used for data processing applications such as payroll and accounting.
It was also used in large business data processing systems and scientific research applications.
The IBM 350 Disk Storage was a major component of the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting) system. A proud modern computer that could easily be transported with a tiny lift truck.
This computer was one of the last computers to use tubes.
- https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html
- https://www.pingdom.com/blog/amazing-facts-and-figures-about-the-evolution-of-hard-disk-drives/
