50 years’ hard

Something I’d forgotten — the hard drive had its 50th birthday the other day. IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC computer (shown here) on September 13th, 1956. It was the first computer to include a disk drive — named the IBM 350 Disk File. The file system consisted of a stack of fifty 24″ spinning discs with a total storage capacity of about 4.4 MB. IBM leased it to customers for $35,000 a year. How times change.