this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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retrocomputing

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IBM announced the world’s first HDD, the 3.75MB RAMAC 350 disk storage unit, 69 years ago today — unit weighed more than a ton, 50 platters ran at 1,200 RPM (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
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[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They used 6 bit encoding for the text, so the drive stored around 5 million characters which would be around 2500-3000 pages of text.

For the break even point you also have to consider how much time it takes to find and access a file and how much time it takes to edit it.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I suppose they did without the grotesque luxury of lower case letters, haha.