IBM shows off a computer that can find a record in six-tenths of a second

Business accounting in 1956 still ran on punch cards, sorted and re-sorted in the order a clerk happened to need them. On September 13, 1956, IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC, a computer built around a new box called the 350 disk storage unit, fifty spinning 24-inch disks that held five million characters and could locate any one of them in about 600 milliseconds. It was the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk storage, A machine could pull a single record without hunting through everything that came before it. IBM built and leased more than a thousand of them; the design was retired in 1969…