RAMAC is an IBM trademark for mass storage products. Two different product families share the RAMAC name. now. ... A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ...

Original RAMAC

IBM 350 RAMAC that is being restored by volunteers in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. source: [http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2006/09/happy_50th_birt.html Silicon Valley Sleuth blog

When it was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system, the first computer to use disk storage, RAMAC was the first hard disk drive and originally an acronym for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control". The RAMAC computer became obsolete in 1962 when the IBM 1400 series of computers became IBM's top selling mainframe. Image File history File linksMetadata Ramac. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Ramac. ... Magnetic disk storage was a critical component of the computer revolution. ... 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... IBM 305 at U. S. Army Red River Arsenal The IBM RAMAC 305 was the first commercial computer that used magnetic disk storage. ... Disk storage is a group of data storage mechanisms for computers; data are transferred to planar surfaces or disks for temporary or permanent storage. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Backronym and Apronym (Discuss) Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and ABC, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced on the basis of this abbreviated written form. ...

The original RAMAC computer could be housed in a room of about 30' by 50' and had a disk storage unit measuring around 5' square. The first hard disk unit was shipped Sept. 13, 1956^[1]. The additional components of the computer were a card reader, a central processing unit and printer. Functions were controlled by both machine language stored on a magnetic drum and a plug-board wired and placed in the unit. Initially the unit featured five megabytes of storage (5 million 7-bit characters, which works out to about 4.4 MB). A system of codes directly understandable by a computers CPU is termed this CPUs native or machine language. ... The Magnetic Drum was invented by G. Taushek in 1932 in Austria. ... Plugboard. ...

One of the features of its random access was a large arm inside the disk storage unit that could locate information by its location number and the arm would go immediately to the information. This made it as quick as any computer in existence at that time.

RAMAC at age 50

In an interview^[2] published in the Wall Street Journal with Currie Munce, research vice president for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which aquired the IBM's storage business, said the entire RAMAC unit weighted over a ton and had to be move around with forklifts and delivered via large cargo airplanes. According to Munce, while the storage capacity of the drive could have been increased above five megabytes, the marketing department at IBM was against a larger capacity drive because they didn't know how to sell a product with more storage. The Wall Street Journal is an influential international daily newspaper published in New York City, New York with an average daily circulation of 1,800,607 (2002). ... Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. ...

As of 2006, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California has a RAMAC disk drive which it is restoring. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View. ... Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California, USA. The city gets its name from the views of the Santa Cruz Mountains. ...

RAMAC redux

In the 1990s, IBM reused the RAMAC name for its Array Storage product family. See also 1990s, the band The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive, sometimes informally including popular culture from the very late 1980s and from 2000 and beyond. ... In computing, a redundant array of inexpensive disks, also later known as redundant array of independent disks (commonly abbreviated RAID) is a system which uses multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. ...

See also

• Early IBM disk storage

Magnetic disk storage is a critical component of the computer revolution. ...

Notes

1. ^ Steven Levy, "The Hard Disk That Changed the World" Newsweek, August 7, 2006
2. ^ Lee Gomes, "Talking Tech" The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2006