The IBM 305 RAMAC stayed in production until 1961, weighed more than a ton, stored five million characters on fifty spinning platters, and still drew customers because the alternative was a room full of punched cards (opens in new tab)

In 1956, IBM showed businesses a refrigerator-sized storage cabinet that could reach a record in less than a second instead of forcing clerks to shuffle through trays of punched cards. The IBM 305 RAMAC system and its IBM 350 disk storage unit turned fifty spinning aluminum platters into something that looked, for the first time, […]