Computers

September 14, 1956

The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit Model 1 was announced, which was the first commercial storage unit to use magnetic disk storage, the technology behind hard disk drives. About the size of two refrigerators and weighing in at one ton, the 350 could store about 4 – 5 megabytes, depending on how it was calculated.

The 350 would be an integral part of the IBM RAMAC 305 computer, which would be introduced 9 days later on September 13th. The RAMAC 305 and 350 Disk Storage Unit were designed to replace the punch card “tub file” system that was the primary means of storing repeatedly accessed data.

September 13, 1983

The Osborne Computer Corporation declares bankruptcy only two years after producing the first portable computer, the Osborne I. Computer industry lore has it that the “Osborne Effect” killed the company, but it was also due to competitive pressure and mismanagement.

September 9, 1945

Operators of the Harvard Mark II find a moth trapped in relay #70 in panel F. The bug is taped to their troubleshooting log where it was written, “First actual case of bug being found”. This was not the first use of the term “bug” for computer problems, but this was the first time the term “debug” was used.

September 5, 1980

The last IBM 7030 “Stretch” mainframe in active use is decommissioned at Brigham Young University. The first Stretch was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961, giving the model almost 20 years of operational service. The Stretch was famous for many things, but perhaps most notably it was the first IBM computer to use transistors instead of vacuum tubes, it was the first computer to be designed with the help of an earlier computer, and it was the world’s fastest computer from 1961 to 1964.