Remembering RAMAC

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 26 May 2005, Paul Koning wrote:

> >>>>> "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.

I was thinking more in terms of space.  A disk is much more efficient in
this regard.  You can stack N times the number of disks in the same space
that a drum takes up.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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