Get the latest tech news
IBM 305 RAMAC and the 1960 Winter Olympics
Exploring the IBM 305 RAMAC and its use in the 1960 Winter Olympics.
That reminds me, when I got shot down if I would have been this much (a few inches) to the right, I wouldn't be here today.- Wesley Dickinson and James Porter discussing IBM’s RAMAC and the creation of the world’s first disk drive I had a smackdackingly memorable summer! I got to see one of Waymo’s earliest prototypes, a bunch of slide rules and mechanical calculators, found a bunch of retro advertisements and posters to explore further, learned about the Silicon Valley Napkin, Michael Noll’s work on computer-generated art, the U.S. Navy’s Project 91, IBM capitalizing on FDR’s Social Security Act, got to be up close to Jacquard’s loom cards and their fabrics, finally got to play Pac-Man the way it was supposed to be played, saw the Enigma machine, the Apollo Guidance Computer, the world’s first RAM chip used in the Whirlwind Computer, Cray-1, a Wozniak-signed Apple 1, one of Google’s earliest servers, the original Ethernet cable, PDP-1, and much, much more. The RAMAC, which had 5 megabytes of hard disk space, was a large machine housed in the glass-walled Olympic Data Processing Center (now the Ski Rental Building).
Or read this on Hacker News
