The Hard Drive's 50th Birthday Party

Today marks 50 years since the first hard disk drive was introduced by IBM in 1956--and the anniversary of this pioneering milestone is being celebrated by the hard drive industry at the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association's Diskcon conference in Santa Clara.

The original, the RAMAC 305, was loud and kludgy--with 50 disk platters, two feet in diameter--and was housed in a chassis almost the size of two refrigerators.

The RAMAC allowed new applications for technology to crop up. Noted Barry Rudolph, vice president of system storage at IBM: "This technology created the ability to process things in real time. Previously, data was batch-processed." With the introduction of the hard drive, online transaction processing took off. Within five years of the RAMAC's introduction, Sabre introduced its airline reservations system, an application that would not have been possible otherwise.

So what did RAMAC stand for? And where is the hard drive going? Read more of our coverage of the anniversary at The Hard Drive Turns 50.