Human Tech Tree
Researched1956 · Atomic & Space Age (1945 – 1990)

Information / Electronics & Computing

Hard Disk Drive

IBM's RAMAC (1956) stores five million characters on spinning magnetic disks with random access; disks become cheap bulk storage.

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Capacity grew millions of times after RAMAC; the giant magnetoresistance effect (1988) enabled the small read heads of modern drives. Hard disks still hold most of the world's online data.

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