You could put a whole mp3 on it
RAMAC 350 would allow businesses to get rid of their old tub files full of punch cards, and many human filing operatives.
For anyone wondering how it made financial sense, as usual, the goal was to replace expensive, touchy, uppity humans with machines.
No, it wasn’t.
It was to speed access to data. Unless you have some evidence the researchers who work with electromechanics at the time were thinking “how can we replace humans”, rather than “how can we represent 80 columns of data electromechanically?”
No need for this nonsensical hyperbole.
I hate uppity humans.
So that’s 20 Hz? Lol. That is like a baloney slicer.
They had the technology to make a much faster platter. But, I suppose the way they were using disk storage at the time might have meant a decent seek time was measured in seconds, and the 800ms was “instant”. The main alternative would have been spooling through a tape.
I like the bit where they wheel in the equivalent amount of data in stacks of punch cards, and the hard drive takes up more space.
(Not fair I know because they didn’t show the punch card reader, but the bits on these platters must be ridiculously large.)
How else are they supposed to program with handheld bar magnets? /s
From those huge machines to microSDs with terabytes. Now we’re discussing AI models and quantum computing. Wondering what we’ll see in future.
I wonder whay type if data protection/redundancy they had on this thing.
Let’s spin up 2 of this bad boys and do a RAID1 configuration!
Edit: RAID0 to RAID1. Don’t want to spread incorrect information.
RAID0 doesn’t give you any protection or redundancy, just speed.
Based on some plausible sounding number I found online, a megabygte is around 500 typed pages. So this thing was 1875 pages of text.
I wonder when the break-even point was for digital vs paper media from a size/weight standpoint.
They used 6 bit encoding for the text, so the drive stored around 5 million characters which would be around 2500-3000 pages of text.
For the break even point you also have to consider how much time it takes to find and access a file and how much time it takes to edit it.
I suppose they did without the grotesque luxury of lower case letters, haha.
Haven’t RTFA yet, but I’m gonna go ahead out on a limb, and say this was one of those “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it” scenarios.
The Tom’s Hardware article doesn’t discuss the pricing structure, however the Wikipedia article does – the RAMAC 305 was leased, not purchased, for $35,800 per month in 2024 USD).
