Birthplace of the Hard Drive
In June 1956, inside an IBM lab in San Jose, a small team of engineers invented something that quietly — and completely — changed the world: the first hard disk drive.
It was called the IBM 305 RAMAC, and it stood the size of two refrigerators, weighed over a ton, and could store just 5 megabytes of data. But for the first time ever, information could be stored on a spinning magnetic disk and accessed directly, not just in sequence like a reel of tape.
This invention laid the foundation for modern computing, from personal computers to smartphones, cloud storage, and everything in between. And it all started right here, in San Jose — turning the city into a key player in the tech revolution long before “Silicon Valley” became a household name.
Fast forward to today, and we now carry terabytes of data in drives smaller than a deck of cards. What once required a forklift now fits in your pocket. This leap in data storage shows just how far computing has come—and how fast innovation can change the game.