Business
The hard drive, 50 years ago
In 1952, IBM opened a research lab in San Jose under Rey Johnson, and one of its first assignments was to come up with a magnetic storage system that could hold 5MB of data, then a whopping amount. Johnson's group used platters coated with magnetic material stacked on top of each other. Data would be fetched by a head that traveled up and down the stack of rotating platters.
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