IBM 305 RAMAC and the 1960 Winter Olympics

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.

Per Wikipedia the RAMAC 305 stored 5 million 8-bit characters[0]. Assuming they&#x27;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&#x27;d be large enough that you could read them optically with one of these visualization tools.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_305_RAMAC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_305_RAMAC</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tapeheads.net&#x2F;threads&#x2F;visualizing-magnetic-signals-on-tape.39958&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tapeheads.net&#x2F;threads&#x2F;visualizing-magnetic-signa...</a>

These things were rented at US$3,200.00 monthly, which would be US$37,004.71 in 2024 dollars.<p>5MB nowadays cost a fraction of a penny.