Technology – Then and Now

Computers are found in more homes and businesses than ever before and have become such a large part of daily life that they are often forgotten about until they become unavailable. I personally like to refer to this as the golden age of computing, simply because of the level of accessibility, low cost and high performance we are now seeing.

I’m sure that those of us who have been in the computer scene for some time remember the outrageous costs of even basic components. My very first PC, a Pentium 3 with all of the bells and whistles available at the time came in at over $3,000, while today, a low end system like a Netbook, would cost a fraction of the price and be significantly more powerful

So just how far has technology come and how much has the cost of computer hardware gone down? According to Dag Spicer, the senior curator of the Computer History Museum; which is set to launch a new exhibit called “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing”. A 1TB drive that retails for $60 today would have cost approximately $1 trillion in the 1950’s, and you thought SSDs were expensive… To put this further into perspective, IBM’s RAMAC 305, Random Access Memory ACcounting system, was the first system to feature spinning, magnetic discs, rather than tape or drum storage. It sold for $200,000 in 1956. Spinning at 1200 RPM, the unit could only store 5MB of data and process approximately 10 kilobytes per second, with a platter density of 100 bits per inch.

This is truly a far cry from recently released 3TB drives or 10,000 RPM high performance drives, but if it were not for the RAMAC unit; which was the precursor for modern mechanical disk drives, we might be further behind or nowhere near where we are today in terms of storage technology or capacity. Google, e-commerce sites such as Amazon or tech sites like our very own Techgage, would never exist due to the large amount of storage needed for each.

In the 1950s, storage hardware was measured in feet — and in tons. Back then, the era’s state-of-the-art computer drive was found in IBM’s RAMAC 305; it consisted of two refrigerator-size boxes that weighed about a ton each. One box held 40 24-inch dual-sided magnetic disk platters; a carriage with two recording heads suspended by compressed air moved up and down the stack to access the disks. The other cabinet contained the data processing unit, the magnetic process drum, magnetic core register and electronic logical and arithmetic circuits.