Although we’re currently concentrating on our first music education quiz for TriviaPark.com, concentration has never been our strongest point. For those of you who wouldn’t know which end of a treble clef to stir your coffee with, here’s a question in a quite different key.
It concerns the changing face of technology
In 1956, a new type of computer peripheral appeared on the market for the first time. What was the IBM 550?
- A disk drive
- A modem
- A printer
- A video display
The 550 was the first disk drive, and the first commercially-available ‘random-access’ storage device. Magnetic tape and punched cards, the dominant storage media of the day, were both ‘sequential-access’ systems, meaning that to find a particular data record required stepping through every record between the current position and the desired one. In a random-access system, all records can be accessed with more or less equal ease, greatly reducing the average access time and simplifying storage management. Compared to the cheap and capacious drives in universal use today, the IBM 550 was a lumbering behemoth, weighing more than a ton but accommodating only about 4.4 megabytes of data — something on the order of a single MP3 file — and with transfer speeds that were glacial by today’s standards. It later became known that although somewhat higher capacities were technically achievable at the time, IBM’s marketing department apparently believed that customers weren’t ready in 1956 to go beyond the 550’s already incomprehensible vastness.
