50 Years of Hard Driving!

Most of the people in todays world use or depend on hard drives, whether directly or indirectly. Storing business data, music, videos, applications; you name it. Starting from 5 MB, 2 refrigerators size and weighing one ton, todays domestic hard drives have reached a tiny size of hardly 5 inches (3.5 form factor) weighing less than 1/3 of a kg and storing hundreds of gigs.

50 years ago on September 13th, IBM shipped the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). It used vacuum tubes (not the one Internet is made of  ) and ran 24-7.
In my childhood, when I hardly knew about computers, I was under impression that only use of computer is that it can remember anything you stuff into it. Even after 10 years it can show you the stuff you stored in it.

The first hard disk I worked on was a 4 GB (thats all I remember) back in 1998 when I was just 12. I remember my school systems ran on 3.5 floppies running BASIC on DOS. Programming on BASIC was fun, each program started with - 10 REM TO SOLVE.

Then came my first ever computer in 2000 - Y2K Free 333 MHz Cyrix, 32 megs of memory and 10 GB storage. OMG that was considered huge at that time and I never went past 6 Gigs.