28 May
2005
28 May
'05
3:16 a.m.
ssiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Tom Jennings
On Fri, 27 May, 2005, Tom Jenning wrote:
On Fri, 27 May 2005, Eric Smith wrote:
Rotating magnetic drum memories were certainly in use by 1948.
Surely, other forms of rotation are obvious enough. And it's not
like people weren't looking for storage then!
The earliest reference I have found to a working drum memory is the
April 1949 version of the University of Manchester (UK) Mark I. This
is said on page 114 in the little book "Early British Computers" by
Simon Lavington. Anyway, that is 56 years ago.
Can anyone produce any references to earlier use?
/Ulf Andersson
Tom wrote:
OK, I'll look!
certainly, IBM did not invent the disk drive.
They may have
commercialized it first, but I doubt that even.
I'd be very interested to hear of any working magnetic disk drive,
commerical or otherwise, predating the IBM RAMAC. Hand-wave
-- it was obvious.
In hindsight it looks obvious. I'm not convinced that it was
obvious 50 years ago.