As I write this my laptop is telling me that my 60 Giga Byte hard drive is almost full and I must do something about it.  This is serious because my laptop and my smart phone are my inseparable companions.  They are my constant companions and connect me with the rest of the world through Wi-Fi and a Sprint data card.  My laptop is my desktop, my library, my contacts, my e-mail, my presentations, my digital photo albums, my personal information, my professional work, even my personal history.  Without the disk drive my life would be a mess.  I would have to resort to tons of pieces of paper and my professional life with IBM would never have materialized.

Well, I have some choices, I can:

• Upgrade to a new laptop with 100 giga bytes of disk space.  It solves the problem but what an ordeal to go through.
• Dump some of my least used files to CD?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s or a backup disk drive.  It buys me some time but it is only a temporary solution and I will miss the data I dumped.
• Compress the data and gain some space but then I lose some performance in dealing with those files.
• Offload some of my files to a web based storage service such as IBackup for Windows but then I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t guarantee that I will always be able to reach them.
  

I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t think I am alone in facing this dilemma.  Our daily lives have become dependent upon the digital data that these little devices soak up like pouring water onto sand.  Now they have even jumped the computer boundary and have penetrated our entertainment domain.  What young person would be seen without an iPod or similar musical device, or what would we do without our Tivo that captures TV programs for us and is soon to be embedded into the latest HDTV?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s.  We can throw away our driving maps because all the information is captured onto a hard drive embedded in a GPS navigation device.  One inch devices have even appeared as Compact Flash cards for digital cameras.  Could ATM machines exist without these devices?  Of course not.  Who knows where the next appearance is going to be?

All of this says nothing about running businesses, airlines and the like.  What businesses today could operate without immediate access to huge data bases managing transactions, schedules and a million other things that need to be attended to?

OK, so hard disk drives are a big deal, how did they happen?  Innocently enough: to solve a problem that would limit how useful a computer could be.  Let?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s follow the trail.

Before computers, records were kept on punched cards.  There were thousands and thousands of these cards kept in trays of about 3,000 cards each.  A file was one or more trays with cards that were kept in sequence.  The sequence was important because that was the only way they could be processed.  Additions to the files were made by merging the additions into the master file using special equipment.  The first primitive commercial computers simply performed the arithmetic calculations for such things as payroll or inventory or accounts payable etc. and entered the results into the punched card

When the big mainframes appeared (that was the only way to build a computer in the beginning) the only digital data was on punched cards so card readers were attached to the computers.  But, that was a terribly slow way to process because the computer would sit idly waiting for the next card to be read etc.  The solution was to convert analogue tape drives into digital tape drives because tape could be read and written to much faster and could hold very large files in a more compact media.  This was much better but still not ideal.  To find a particular record the computer would have to search through a tape, record by record until it found the one it was looking for.  Again, a lot of wasted time for a very expensive machine.  Besides, doing work in batches was a function of the way records were assembled into files, not necessarily the way a business wanted to run.  For instance, it was not possible to find out what the inventory of a particular item was without running the inventory tape and wading through lots of records before the item record appeared.  A totally impractical use of a mainframe.

IBM in 1952, recognizing that in order for computers to realize their potential this problem must be solved, asked an engineer by the name of Rey Johnson to form a research group in San Jose, California to study possible solutions to this problem.  He quickly formed  a small group for this purpose.  Univac was also studying this problem and had decided to use large magnetic drums rotating at high speed as a their solution.  Rey Johnson felt that the outer surface of a drum would not hold enough data to solve the problem.  He was intrigued by the idea of using disks somewhat like the long play record disks of that time but stacked in multiples to provide a much larger available surface for recording.  After four years of development the basic engineering issues had been put to bed and IBM, on September 13th 1956 announced the 305 RAMAC ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú a Random-Access Method of Accounting and Control System.  It comprised a disk unit coupled with a small vacuum tube, relay and drum computer, a console, card reader and stick printer.



The disk unit contained 50 - 24 inch diameter platters on a spindle with an arm with two read/write heads that were inserted between the disks.  The arm assembly was driven up and down a track by compressed air and that was also fed through the read/write heads, preventing the heads from coming into contact with the magnetic surface of the disks.  The capacity of the unit was 100 million characters of 6 bits plus parity each.  The disk unit weighed one ton!

Just 50 years ago, shortly after the announcement, a truck pulled up outside one of my customers ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú Zellerbach Paper Co. on Battery Street, San Francisco.  In it was the #1 RAMAC to be delivered to an IBM customer for application development.  Needless to say, it was a thrill to be associated with such a break through product but it was beyond my wildest dreams that I would become deeply involved in the development of many of IBM?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s products that depended upon these disks.

Thus San Jose became the home of The IBM Disk Drive even though in later years disk development activity also took place in Hursley, England, Yamato, Japan and Rochester, Minnesota.

The disk drive was critical to IBM?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s success but it was the Personal Computer that really put the disk drive on the map.  The PC forced the miniaturization of the device and large scale manufacturing that achieved economies of scale undreamed of until then.

My humble laptop has 18,000 times the capacity of the original RAMAC, is more than 3,000 times smaller, weighs a few ounces instead of a ton yet we know that there is more to come.  The current technology curve will provide several more generations of improvements and, true to form, I expect the demand will be there waiting for the next step in the revolutionary process.

So, I guess my next step will be the newest, latest and greatest because my needs will inexorably continue to grow - this is the age we live in.