Birthplace of the Hard Disc Drive (San Jose, California)

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Currently occupied by an office of the Santa Clara Superior Court, 99 Notre Dame Street is the site of an IBM research laboratory in the 1950's. There, in 1953 IBM recognized the immediate application of disk drives and developed and sold the first disk drive computer called IBM 305 RAMAC in 1956 and the drive had a capacity of about 4 megabytes. This system also happened to be the last of IBM's vacuum tube-based systems. The work resulted in US Patent 3,503,060 . It is generally considered to be the fundamental patent for disk drives.

www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/ramac.html
www.magneticdiskheritagecenter.org/


The painted sign mounted on a pole on the sidewalk reads:

IBM RAMAC

In 1952, IBM sent Reynold Johnson to San José to open its first West
Coast development laboratory to research new data storage methods. At
this site in 1955, IBM unveiled RAMAC (Random Access Method of
Accounting and Control), the world's first system for stroing computer
data in magnetic disks. This technology is the basis for many of today's
computer applications. In 1984, the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers named RAMAC an International HIstoric Mechanical
Engineering Landmark. In 1986 Rey Johnson recieved the National
Medal of Technology from President Reagan.

See also:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_driv...