A
decent aspect regarding living in Silicon Valley,at slightest to a
specialist like me, is seeing engineering used to enrich office
structures. Where else would you discover an office anteroom
beautified with a gathering of chips implanted in an end table,
different obsolescents and ancient rarities from the former days of
processing gear, or dividers secured with many plaques, each one
bearing a reproduction of the front page of a US patent?
Recently
I visited one of Western Digital's neighborhood offices and
discovered it to be beautified with a bit of registering supplies
from the 1950s, the hard circle drive for an IBM RAMAC. The RAMAC, or
Random Access Memory Accounting Machine, was the first framework to
utilize a hard circle drive, and that hard drive was developed and
initially created right in San Jose. In spite of the fact that it is
regularly imagined that stand out RAMAC is on presentation in the
Valley, at the Computer History Museum, the one I am remaining before
in the photograph beneath is likewise there for the survey joy of
visitors right in the entryway of the Yerba Buena office complex. You
don't even need to experience security to get to it.
The
vacuum-tube RAMAC was the first to utilize a hard drive, and this
drive put away an astounding 5 million characters, which is somewhat
short of what 4 megabytes on fifty 24-inch plates. Contrast this with
a present day outer hard drive which commonly stores a terabyte, or
250,000 times as much, on a solitary 2.5-inch platter despite the
fact that it fits in the palm of your hand.
Truth
be told, the origination for the hard plate drive is right in
downtown San Jose, in a building that bears a dedicatory plaque and
is presently utilized for a family court. I'll blanket a visit to
that office in a later post.
