https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/
"On the north side of downtown San Jose, tucked against a gentle curve in
California State Route 87 and the Guadalupe River that it follows, sits a
nondescript single-story off-white building with tinted windows. As of the time
of writing this, signs exclaim that 99 Notre Dame Avenue is available for
lease. The two adjacent lots are also empty and being used as parking lots,
mostly as overflow for the municipal courthouse a few blocks away. Across the
street the condos start, glassy and standardized, one pale red and cream and
the next a mixture of aqua and silver, stretching to the sky for blocks east
toward City Hall and south until you hit the looming corporate headquarters of
Adobe Inc. The low building’s only active neighbor is a weightlifting and
martial arts gym in the adjoining warehouse that gives no hint of what used to
be built there. Otherwise it sits alone.
In the 1950s, 99 Notre Dame Avenue housed IBM’s first West Coast laboratory.
Back then it overlooked a plum orchard. Between 1952 and 1956, a team of
engineers led by a former high school science teacher designed and built the
IBM 350 disk storage unit, part of the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first computer system
that included something resembling a hard drive.
Before RAMAC, to store and access computer data was a laborious process
involving feeding stacks of punch cards through machines. Other early
solutions, like storing data on magnetic tape, were effective but slow. The IBM
team created spinning aluminum disks readable by a magnetic arm which allowed
data to be retrieved in a literal blink. The 24-inch platters were stacked 50
at a time in a cylinder. They rotated at close to 1200 rpm. Even in the 1950s,
with the room-sized console only capable of storing 3.75 megabytes and weighing
over a ton, this machine could retrieve data in 800 milliseconds.
The revolutionary element of the hard disk drive was not that it stored data
for computers—there were plenty of other methods for that—but that you could
store data that could then be accessed almost instantly. Your storage could be
constantly connected to your system, an integral component, representing a
tremendous shift in both the technical and conceptual idea of what a computer
could even be.
RAMAC is the ancestor of every hard drive, every server, every relational
database, every cloud. 99 Notre Dame Avenue is its birthplace. For digital
storage, this is the Trinity Test Site, the explosive center from which all
else follows."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
