Nerd Antiques

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.