[HN Gopher] IBM 305 RAMAC and the 1960 Winter Olympics
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IBM 305 RAMAC and the 1960 Winter Olympics
Author : pncnmnp
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-09-03 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pncnmnp.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (pncnmnp.github.io)
| forinti wrote:
| These things were rented at US$3,200.00 monthly, which would be
| US$37,004.71 in 2024 dollars.
|
| 5MB nowadays cost a fraction of a penny.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > 5MB nowadays
|
| Somehow we manage to piss away computing resources like
| nothing, requiring more and more to do the same work. So I
| guess for meaningful comparisons we need a way to inflation
| adjust computing resources too?
|
| E.g. 5MB of 1965 disk storage, roughly equivalent to 10 TB in
| the eyes of 2024 programs?
|
| Maybe we could draw a comparisons by how much a base
| installation of a recent OS would eat away, or how much of the
| available RAM an at-the-time-modern text editor would gobble
| up? E.g. 1980s Emacs vs whatever currently popular Electron
| behemoth to compare RAM on computers from those respective
| epochs.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Are we really "pissing it away"? For example the fact that VS
| Code is an Electron app written in HTML, CSS and TypeScript
| opened the door for many extension developers. I prefer it
| this way compared to the older native/Java-based IDEs.
| Halian wrote:
| Meanwhile, the reverse is true for me. I'm sick and tired
| of desktop chat clients and other applications being, or
| turning into, single-purpose Chromium instances.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The editor I'm using today updates itself from a global
| network of interconnected computers, using strong
| cryptography to ensure no one's tampered with it. It can
| download plugins from that same inter-net and has a sandbox
| that keeps malicious code from taking over the rest of its
| process space or accessing the filesystem. Some of those
| plugins make their own encrypted connections to distant
| computers. It displays its user interface on a truecolor
| screen across 2 2560x1440 monitors. It understands a huge
| number of programming languages and has advanced
| reformatting, error checking, syntax highlighting, search,
| building, testing, and reference-finding capabilities that
| can easily handle version controlled codebases with gigabytes
| of code. Because all its pointers are twice the size of those
| in older systems, I can open individual files many gigabytes
| in size.
|
| Yeah, it's bigger than Emacs on a PDP-11. It does a whole lot
| more than Pico does, too.
| samatman wrote:
| 5MB of 1965 disk storage, as the article helpfully points
| out, stores 5 million (EBCDIC) characters of text.
|
| 5MB of 2024 storage, stores 5 million (ASCII) or as little as
| 1.25 million (UTF-8) characters of text.
|
| There's no inflation to adjust here. There are still people
| programming microcontrollers with 1KiB or 512 bytes of RAM,
| 4KiB EEPROM, and maybe 1MB Flash. Those computers can do
| about the same things which 1965 computers with the same
| specs can do, just 20-100 times faster. Just because we don't
| use an AVR to add up Olympic scores, doesn't mean we
| couldn't.
|
| The ones with five orders of magnitude more resources do a
| lot more. Some of it is squandered, when we can afford to do
| that, but in applications like AAA gaming or simulation, not
| so much. They operate near-optimally, just much faster, and
| doing a great deal more than was possible at the time.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| At some point, 5MB of storage went from something that would
| kill you if dropped on your head, to something you might choke
| on if accidentally ingested.
|
| (I'd put the cutover in the mid-1980s, when a handful of
| floppies would both be too large to swallow and too light to do
| much drop damage)
| ForOldHack wrote:
| 14.2 360k floppies would weigh 9 oz.
|
| ( 5120Kb / 360Kb = 14.2 floppies, and they weigh 18 grams a
| piece, 15 floppies at 18 grams is 0.27Kg = 9.5 oz.) Box and a
| half of 10. ONE floppy would be too much to swallow, and
| although soft, its corner could do some damage if dropped on
| the sharp corner).
|
| The 305 RAMDAC unit weighed over a ton."
|
| </end math></end physics></end analogy>
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+muc.
| ..
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Per Wikipedia the RAMAC 305 stored 5 million 8-bit characters[0].
| Assuming they're using all 100 surfaces of the 50 disks in the
| unit that only comes out to 400,000 bits per surface. At the size
| of those platters the magnetic domains that encoded the bits must
| have been positively huge. There are products that could be used
| to visualize magnetic domains on tape[1]. The RAMAC platters seem
| like they'd be large enough that you could read them optically
| with one of these visualization tools.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC
|
| [1] https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/visualizing-magnetic-
| signa...
| Aloha wrote:
| The thing you'll see if you read the oral history, was they
| could have made it bigger, but 5MB was so much storage then,
| they were unsure how to sell a bigger one.
| kens wrote:
| The IBM 305 RAMAC is demonstrated at the Computer History Museum
| on Wednesdays at 1:00 p.m. It's an impressive machine to see in
| action. It has one arm for all the platters; the seek time is
| very slow as the arm is retracted, moves up or down to a new
| platter, and then engages. To keep the head floating above the
| surface, an air pump (maybe 1/4 HP) provides air flow.
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