Remembering RAMAC

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> writes:

 Vintage> On Thu, 26 May 2005, Paul Koning wrote:
 Al> Or magnetic drums, which did NOT have the access time problems of
 Al> tape or cards (but, unfortunately weren't an IBM invention)
 >> Did the drum come before RAMAC?

 Vintage> Yes.  Many years (I believe about six).

 >> An obvious difference is that drums, being head per track devices,
 >> always had rather low capacity.

 Vintage> And disks are much more efficient than drums anyway.

I don't think head per track disks are necessarily any more efficient
than head per track drums.  They overlapped somewhat in time, and I
think the capacity was reasonably comparable.

Moving head disks are far more efficient because you can put down a
lot more tracks, even in the very early days, than is reasonable on a
head per track ("fixed head") disk or drum.  Consider the early 1960s
1311 with 100 tracks, vs. the RF11 with (if I remember right) 32
tracks.

	paul