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Kitchen Table Kibitzing September 4, 2022 [1]

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Date: 2022-09-04

Tomorrow I pick up my new MacBook Air at the Apple store. I made an appointment at the “Genius Bar” to get all the help they’ll give, since last week they asserted that my old MacBook was too old for them to migrate the data. Thumb drives are now Flash drives so I bought a 128 GB one to help in any data transfer. It cost $12.99. Now nobody actually knows what a GB is, but it’s a lot. And it made me think of the first disk drive, from around the time I began programming on a Univac II. The mass storage on the Univac was magnetic tapes.

IBM UNLEASHED THE world's first computer hard disk drive in 1956. It was bigger than a refrigerator. It weighed more than a ton. And it looked kinda like one of those massive cylindrical air conditioning units that used to sit outside your grade school cafeteria. The RAMAC hard drive could hold roughly 5MB of data, the equivalent of an MP3 music file. That may seem puny, but in the 50s, it was enormous.

Still works.



Hoagland was the man who began the restoration of the RAMAC that's now at the Computer History Museum, one of roughly 1,000 systems built by IBM over the years. He went to work on the device alongside some students at Santa Clara University, and eventually, Bennet and Feng were able to actually retrieve information that had been stored on the thing almost 40 years before.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/4/2120778/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-September-4-2022

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