RAMAC and Interactivity: Pictorial History of Media Technology

IBM 305 RAMACPictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production. What’s so important about the RAMAC?

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on An Excerpt from Mechanisms, Professor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.