Thank you sharing this. My Grandfather worked at IBM in the 50’s and was part of the 305 team. It’s a legacy I’m very proud of and have many of his original papers and blueprints. One being a blueprint and patent submission of this for a Random Access Drum. At one point, he worked with John Seagate. It’s amazing to think that a Megabyte was about $10,000 then.
As a girl, I'd go on one Saturday a month with my father where he worked on these machines. Lots of noise in a big warm room with fans, elevated floors containing miles of wire that he sometimes needed to replace and rework. It was neat-o. I would rollerskate on those floors.
I wish I had save my programming manuals to the 305 RAMAC and some of the old punched card machines, especially the 407 tabulator and the 605 calculator. I even had access to the repairman's manuals. Those were the good ole days.
Looking back at the RAMAC and seeing the technology we have available today, what do you have to say about how far and fast computers have evolved? How far did y'all expect computer tech to advance?
I was fortunate to see most of the progression of computers. The 305 RAMAC required 1/3 second to add two numbers. If you want to know if the result was positive, negative, or zero it required 1/2 second. Multiply and divide was optional, which we had. The drum where the executable instructions were stored held only 200. A practical program required reading routines from the extremely large and slow disks on to the drum. I never expected computer to be as fast and versatile as they are today. They do millions of instructions in 1 second and run extremely sophisticated programs. I forget how much data the disk drive then held. Today on drive hold terabytes of data. You can also have thousands of people logged into a program at one time. There was a program called VM-370 (?) that would allow hundreds of users to log into the operating system and simulate having a complete computer for themselves. Ah, things certainly have progressed. Offfway12991, did you program on the 305 RAMAC? Where and when did you do it? I was in the US Army in Poitiers, France in the early 1960s.
I've only ever fiddled with a 305 that a friend of mine bought. He's a private collector of old computers and he was really happy to get a 305 because he used one back in the early 60s as well when he was a counter-SIGINT and something else. I can't remember where he was stationed, though. I just think it's absolutely fascinating to see how it's all evolved. And (if I remember correctly) the 305 only had 5mb of storage. Sorry, I didn't mean to ask so many questions. I just like talking to people that used older tech when it was state-of-the-art to see what they think of computer evolution.
Don't worry about asking questions. I like to talk about computers. Does your friend still have the 305? What city does he live in? It would be great to see old computers if I ever go near where they are. You can give him my email address if he wants to talk - LRClifford02@gmail.com. Just don't pass it around. I live in Richmond, KY.
Amazing technology, I found this video years ago and still come back and watch it for fun!. its a shame most of these have been scrapped, along with their predecessors :(
Look at that behemoth, it's bigger than a refrigerator. Almost 60 years later, the smallest hard drives ever built can easily fit in the palm of your hand. 30 years ago, most computers didn't even *have* a hard drive, they usually cost more than the computer that used it. It's amazing to see how far technology has progressed.
M.2 hard drives are the smallest with the highest storage capacity now costing under $100 up to $200 tops. This thing costed companies & the military over $30k a month to own & run.
Such speed and ease of handling data was almost unthinkable back then. It was such a leap forward in technology that it completely changed the way data was processed.
@@MyAsdfqwe If you told these engineers we have Billions of Circuits in a single chip they would be blown away. They had thousands of them at max in the size of a room!
I am at my input station inputting this data. The data is outputted on the output device located in front of me. The processing module will send the data to a web of other processing modules and the data will be read by other operators through their output devices.
It's amazing that in just 50 years, it went from 5 megs of space that was the size of a kitchen room to a 1 terabyte hard drive that's the size of a small purse. There's also word that by the year 2025, hard drives may hit the pedabyte mark.
Wow! what a beast, I guess it uses only one side of the disc. The price must have been astronomical, the maintenance contract, eye watering. 600ms access time for the RAMAC vs. 6ms for a decent modern drive (100x faster) Modern drivs 6ms vs. 6µs for SSDs (1,000x faster) Modern hard disc drives have reached a plateau of performance, Flash memory will replace them in the very near future, my XPS has two 512GB SSDs and its like lightning.
I am researching Reynold Johnson. He was a genius inventor; he had over 90 patents! He was a high school science and math teacher at Ironwood High School in the western part of Michigan's upper peninsula, during the early years of The Great Depression. But the school fired several teachers in 1933, because of budget cuts, including Reynold. Reynold had been working on an automatic grading machine. IBM bought his grading machine. They hired him in 1952, and gave him the job of inventing some way to store computer data that was better than punch cards. He put together a team in 1953, and by 1956 they had invented the world's first hard drive, the 305 RAMAC! It stored 5 megabytes on 50 platters, coated with magnetic paint, spinning at 1,200 revolutions per minute. It costs $50,000. In 2019 dollars, that works out to $473,063. And a company could rent one for $750 a month. Today 5 megabytes doesn't sound like much, but in 1956, 5 megabytes was enormous! And a hard drive was so much better than working with punch cards! One punch card held 80 characters. When a punch card had too many holes, or several holes that were close together, it was fragile. When a machine tried to process that card, the weak card buckled and jammed the machine, messing up that entire batch. Reynold also invented: 1: The videocassette tape! 2: Talk To Me books for Fisher Price! Sony had been using reel to reel tapes. Reynold wanted something small enough that a child could handle. And, of course, it had to be reasonably child proof. Hence he put the tape inside a plastic shell to protect it.
Amazing machine, but calling it a computer is incorrect. This was the last generation of plugboard accounting machines made by IBM. IBM 610 was the small system, 650 the midsize system and 305 was the large system. These were not general purpose computers - out of all these machines only the 650 could do branching without using the plugboard. Nonetheless, IBM spared no expense when it designed these machines. Check out the futuristic looking keyboard at 4:42 and compare it to the clunky typewriter consoles in use in the '50s.
echidnamedia All three machines were stored-program machines, but not real computers. They were hybrids between plugboard tabulators and programmed calculators, and resembled more the IBM series 400/600 of accounting machines. Their architecture was nothing like that of a computer. For instance, IBM 650 had no RAM, just an external magnetic drum, and the program was executed line by line from the external support - imagine how fast that was. IBM 610 was even worse, instead of a magnetic drum it run the program stored on a paper tape and had no branching capability unless the plugboard was used. In addition, all these machines were decimal not binary.
@@danoprea9685 the 650 was a bit more, at least in the sense that a good student, learning to program on a 650 RAMAC, would be relatively well-prepared for programming on full mainframes of that era.
Imagine how much data could be stored on this if we used today's data density! About 500TB mabey, older day saying would be 1000000000000000 characters!
Imagine if we told them back then that we will have computers the same size that will store millions of short videos of their grand kids doing stupid and/or dirty things on a social media platform.
Old people get shit all the time for being bad with technology, but the computers of this era look super complicated for something with so few functions.
Amazing mechanical design for serviceability in those days. Now, if you brought up such ideas they would be instantly dismissed as being too expensive.
So this would read from a disk instead of tape right? So basically it wouldn't matter the order of which the records come in right ? Then you needed some kind of index too then right? I learned about sequential file updates this year in programming logic and this kinda looks familiar . You know like if the CMRF equal TRANS update the master record, if CMRF lessthan TRANS an error has occurred, and if CMRF greaterthan TRANS no changes have been made.
@Brickstin I just realized. It's so easy to do data management, read/write/print operations and stuff nowadays and a big bunch of office workers fail to understand the logic of modern computers... :/ what a contrast....
How did programmers, technicians, users.. of those machines get output from the computer? I hardly see screens in those footages... punched cards, continuous paper maybe?
A printer was available. My unit in the US Army punched out cards and then printed the information on a 407 card tabulator. The 407 was controlled by many wires in a special "plug board" and could print, add and subtract. No multiplication or division. This was extremely crude considering today's personal computers.
The lady is thinking: "Wo0t!! 5 MB of storage! Finally, I can enjoy my MP3 high-fidelity recording of Beyonce's "Single ladies" without a magnifying glass and a stack of punched cards as high as my house anymore!" lulz
that'd be a bit too small for me. i'd probably end up crushing it trying to turn it on, and upgrading it'd be a nightmare with my homer simpson fingers.
