3 ms·
> When the first hard disk (IBM RAMAC) was developed, people drew the same sorts of conclusions. The difference there was that they weren't convinced that the d
by tivert 8y ago
> When the first hard disk (IBM RAMAC) was developed, people drew the same sorts of conclusions. The difference there was that they weren't convinced that the disk would be faster than a secretarial pool. The net was that IBM invented hashing and made it definitively the case that the disk WAS faster.
Source? The impression that I got at the Computer History Museum was that they had specific performance requirements from a customer that they engineered to.
- mschaef 8y agoFrom here, iirc: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibms-early-computers https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibms-early-computers Don’t have it with me, or I would check for the specific quote. This has come up previously on HN, and I wrote a few more details back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16274812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16274812 (Although still not an exact cite. :-( )