This is the second in a series of occasional excerpts from my current book project, Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality. Like the first such excerpt, “Grammatology of the Hard Drive,” this material is drawn from the chapter entitled “Extreme Inscription”; it is a portion of a longer section that argues for the origins of interactive computing in random access storage devices, particularly the magnetic hard disk, as opposed to the slightly later genealogy (usually traced through SAGE and Douglas Engelbart) that emphasizes real-time screen displays, direct manipulation, the GUI, and the mouse. The material here presents background on what may be both the first digital library and the first computational character. This work is still very much in draft, and I’d greatly appreciate comments and feedback.
For simplicity of formatting I have omitted the notes.
Mechanisms is under contract to the MIT Press. All material is offered here as copyright © Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, all rights reserved. This copyright notice supersedes the Creative Commons license in place for the rest of the blog.
Among the attractions at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld “Professor RAMAC,” a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to users’ queries on a two thousand year historical span ranging from “. . . the birth of Christ to the launching of Sputnik 1.” Described as an “electronic ‘genius’” with “almost total historical recall and the ability to speak 10 languages” the Professor offered the general public its first encounter with the magnetic disk storage technology today called the hard drive. Technically known as the RAMAC 305, the machine had been developed at IBM a few years earlier and was then in use by a handful of corporate clients, notably United Airlines. It was typically paired with an IBM 650, a general-purpose business computer. The RAMAC was capable of storing five million 7-bit characters on 50 vertically stacked disks, each two feet wide and rotating at 1200 RPM. In contemporary parlance this means that the first hard drive had a capacity of about 5 megabytes. The machine leased for $3200 a month, ran on vacuum tubes, and was taken off the market by 1961; some 1500 were manufactured in all.
When the RAMAC was first announced in 1956, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., President of IBM, opined that it was “the greatest product day in the history of IBM.” The remark was arguably not an overstatement. The RAMAC, which stood for Random Access Memory and Control, was, as its name implies, a random access storage device. This was fundamentally different from the strips of punched paper and magnetic tape that then dominated computer storage. As Paul E. Ceruzzi notes, “[i]n time, the interactive style of computing made possible by random access disk memory would force IBM, as well as the rest of the computer industry, to redefine itself” (70). This is a powerful insight, and not often grasped by students of new media who tend to ascribe “interactivity” to the advent of the mouse and the graphical screen, typically via Douglas Englebart’s NLS demo a decade later. (Incidentally, the NLS system Englebart introduced was based upon a Scientific Data Systems SDS 940 time-sharing computer with approximately 96 MB of magnetic disk storage. ) Professor RAMAC, I want to argue, inaugurated an important new trend in human-computer interaction, to which the importance of the hard drive is still not widely appreciated. According to the IBM press kit for the Brussels pavilion:
Visitors to the fair will be able to ask the machine what were the most important historical events in any year from 4 B.C. to the present and RAMAC will print out the answers on an electronic typewriter in a matter of seconds. . . . A query to the professor on what events took place in the year 30 A.D., for example, would yield answers like this: “Salome obtained the head of Saint John the Baptist.” In 1480? “Leonardo da Vinci invented the parachute.” In 1776? “Mozart composed his first opera at the age of 11.”
There are several observations to make here, starting with the Professor’s title and occupation. In 1950 Edmund C. Berkeley had published a book entitled Giant Brains: or Machines That Think, the first work to introduce computers to a general audience. The shift from Berkeley’s anthropomorphism to the RAMAC’s full-fledged personification as a “Professor” or “genius” hints at the kinds of synthetic identities that would culminate with Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000 only a decade later. Second, we should note that while the Professor’s “almost total historical recall” was strictly hardwired, the notion of a computer endowed with the kind of encyclopedic capacity we today take for granted in an era of world wide webs and electronic archives would have then seemed quite novel. Much of the American public, for example, had first encountered computers during the 1952 presidential campaign, when the UNIVAC 5 (correctly) forecast Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson a month ahead of time on live TV. Computers were thus on record as instruments of prediction and prognostication, not retrospection. The RAMAC, by contrast, represented what was perhaps the first digital library. Its multi-lingual capability, a brute force flourish clearly meant to impress, is also worth a comment: in the context of the World’s Fair it no doubt served to reinforce the machine’s supposed objectivity, its omniscient command of the human record and status as an impartial observer—at least until one realized that with the exception of Interlingua, an artificial language, the languages in question were all those of the major European or imperial powers: English, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, German, and Russian. (That these were also all alphabetic languages compatible with the text processing technology of the day reinforces rather than diminishes the point.) As perhaps the earliest computational personality on record (almost a decade before Weizenbaum’s ELIZA), the Professor was thus marked out as a first-world citizen of the post-colonial present as well as a trans-historical rememberer of things past.
The RAMAC 305 was an instance of what is generally classed as a storage device. While storage technology has been well chronicled in corporate histories of the computer industry, it has not received much attention in critical media studies. Friedrich Kittler now writes his groundbreaking essays about Intel processors, not the contemporary storage devices that are the heirs to his gramophones, filmstrips, and typewriters. Lev Manovich, Matthew Fuller, and others in the nascent software studies movement tend to focus their attention on interfaces and end-user applications. Perhaps this is to be expected. The word itself, storage, is dull and flat sounding, like footfalls on linoleum. It has a vague industrial aura—tape farms under the fluorescents, not the Flash memory sticks that are the skate-keys of the wifi street. But it is precisely random access disk storage, as inaugurated by the RAMAC, which enabled the database paradigm Manovich sees as fundamental to contemporary new media.
For Manovich, new media productions are characterized by the discrete nature of their constituent objects, and the lack of an essential narrative or sequential structure for how those objects are accessed and manipulated: “In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database” (226). And while Manovich is reluctant to associate database and narrative with specific storage technologies in any deterministic sense—the codex book, he notes, is the random access device par excellence, yet it is a haven for some of our most powerful narrative forms (233)—the fact remains that computers could not have evolved from war-time calculators to new media databases without the introduction of a non-volatile, large-volume, inexpensive storage technology that afforded the operator near-instantaneous access. Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.
Posted by mgk at December 12, 2003 11:36 AMI had typed a long comment here, previewed it, then got distracted before I hit "submit". Drat. Thanks for another tantalizing glimpse of your work.I wanted to know a little more about the interface, even though I recognize that it's not your focus. RAMAC is said to "speak" but at the same time the output is identified as typed characters. How, exactly, did the visitors "ask" RAMAC for data? It seems that the only thing they could input was a calendar year. Obviously, Matt, you're pointing out that was notable about RAMAC is not the same things that were being hyped at the time, but I was wondering whether a sentence or two describing what RAMAC was actually accomplishing would permit a more critical reading of contemporary accounts of RAMAC's achievements. But I recognize that maybe that would be taking this section off on a tangent.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at December 12, 2003 04:13 PM | Link to CommentNice work Matt. Somewhere in your work you might like to contrast the above with Stelarc's 'head' a current project. He has a synthesised head which you can ask questions of (via a keyboard but I think speech recognition is planned) the head and it replies, to the best of its abilities, with expression, intonation and an answer. Sort of ELIZA meets RAMAC in terms of how it is presented (it is currently being exhibited at ACMI here in Melbourne), and the ideologies of celebration of technology that surround it are uncannily similar (though not perhaps the conversations that Stelarc thinks the work represents).
Here the interface has become face, but random access remains the unstated privilege that makes it all fundamentally possible.
Posted by: Adrian Miles at December 13, 2003 02:32 AM | Link to CommentDennis and Adrian, thanks for the comments. Dennis, I have not been able to find out as much about the input procedure as I would like--but I must assume, from the accounts I do have and the limits (read: non-existance) of natural language processing that input must have been limited to calendar year, to which the RAMAC would spit back its factoids. The interface was what IBM called an "electronic [not electric] typewriter," capable of sending inputs directly to the processor. Output would then be rendered as typed characters on a roll of paper--the slippage between writing and speech here is indeed suggestive.
The critical point about random access (and this applies to Adrian's comment as well) is that it's anything but random. In fact, addressing routines (how to locate data on the disk) were an important aspect of the technical research that went into RAMAC. The next part of this section looks in detail at the heterogeneous storage media of the day and the way in which both human- and machine-readable inscriptions co-existed and co-depended in the rationalized workplace. By delivering data in "real time" the RAMAC and its successors enabled cybernetic concepts like feedback to displace Taylorism and older stlyes of scientific management.
Posted by: MGK at December 13, 2003 10:43 AM | Link to CommentVery interesting piece, Matt. As you just pointed out, "random" here is "anything but random" in the sense of the word meaning "unpredictable," but it's used in a different, perfectly apt sense of that word, meaning "arbitrary." Access to a hard disk data anywhere on the disk (arbirarially, or randomly, chosen) is fast.
You don't exactly make the claim that RAMAC is an "evolution" of the early, purely-calculating computer, but you suggest this when you mention the evolution of computers into new media databases. This suggests that information retrieval is somehow simply a better ability than calcultion. But it isn't; it's a different ability that can be put together with calculation in interesting ways. The UNIVAC 5 program that predicted the 1952 election couldn't have told you what happened in 1480, but the program running on Professor RAMAC also couldn't have predicted the 1952 election. So I'd characterize RAMAC as an important step in the development of a new capability - perhaps one that's been unfortunately overlooked when compared to the more visible issues on the interface level. This is pretty much your characterization, but since conventional wisdom in new media sometimes assumes that the database is "better than" computational ability, it seemed worthwhile to mention this here.
Posted by: nick at December 13, 2003 11:39 AM | Link to CommentThanks Nick, points well taken. Fundamentally, of course, _everything_ the computer does--information retrieval or anything else--is a computation, and so of course one can't minimize that dimension of new media. In terms of computing's social (or aesthetic or imaginative) impact, however, I do think there can be useful ways of distinguishing/opposing calculation and, say, representation. Most people who buy a computer so that they can make MP3s or digital photographs are not nearly as interested in the former as the latter. Two quick caveats, though: one, I suspect many users find themselves sliding into calculation faster and more thoroughly than they might think (manipulating the digital image in Photoshop, for example, has as much to do with computation as representation); and second, such distinctions are always only finally heuristics, to be discarded when their potential to generate critical insight no longer much exceeds the ground truth of computation.
Posted by: MGK at December 14, 2003 04:07 PM | Link to CommentHi - interesting piece - not least the idea that ramac might be considered the first digital library - looking forward to more excerpts. I would like to add a question although some time has passed since you posted it.
I wonder whether the principle of random access is not a more fundamental feature of the computer than you seem to imply? Already Turing's formalism operated by having symbols assigned specific addresses. And as computers operate with minimum two levels of representation (the binary level and the interface level) whose relation is open and algorithmically controlled, it seems to me that random access as experienced at the interface level is independent of whether the storage device is a magnetic tape or hard disks. Or to pose it differently, how fundamental do you consider the difference to be?
I do not mean to question the significance of a 'material' perspective on actual storage techniques and the degree to which they have made new ways of employing the basic potentials of the computer practically possible - but the underlying logic seems to me to have been already in place.
Hi, Rune. Thanks for the good feedback. From a historical perspective, I think the difference between random and sequential access is pretty fundamental. The UNIVAC is a case in point here--as Paul Ceruzzi notes in his History of Modern Computing (MITP), its revolutionary character lay not only in its implementation of the stored program concept or the speed of its processor but in its magnetic tape storage system: To the extent that its customers perceived the UNIVAC as an electronic brain it was because it knew where to find the desired data on a tape, could wind or rewind the tape to that place, and could extract (or record) data automatically (30). One of the things I'm interested in doing in the project is bringing different storage technologies into the purview of what is perceived as relevant for electronic textual criticism . . .
Posted by: MGK at June 4, 2004 05:03 PM | Link to CommentThis may be a little late but I was one of the first in Canada to program and use the RAMAC in a business back in '57. The company at the time was Northern Eelctric, now called Nortel Networks. We were the sales organization and had warehouses around the country. Our applications were Inventory Control, Order Processing and Invoicing. Later we added Accounts Receivable. Input from the branches came to us in the form of punched paper tape which we converted to punched cards that were then read into RAMAC via a punch card reader. The console was used to answer stock availability queries phoned in from the sales desks. Originally a IBM 407 was used to do the printing but this was replaced by a true printer at, I think 100 characters per minute. This printed the orders, invoices and reports. There was a card punch attached that was used to produce order info to replenish stock when stock levels reached a reorder level plus other things. We had a just in time ordering system and one of our guys wrote the first operating system that ever existed.
Posted by: Fred Woffenden at June 30, 2004 04:23 PM | Link to CommentIn our case the files were organized into Progrem Files in one section of discs, Custommer files in another section and product info in a third. We controlled the address and file confiruration and assigned the addresses. A catalogue was issued showing the Part Number (disk address) and product description and a list of the customers with their addresses. Ship to Addresses were puncheed into punched cards. The first 2 colums of each card had a numeric digit. The operation system would read these and select the program that would process the info. Before each read and after each write the system would check to see if there was an inquiry.
Programming consisted of a coded, I thing, 6 or 7 charter instruction, the 7th digit was used to test for comparison or accumulator conditions. This told the machine to go to the control panel to find out what to do based on the result. There was room for 10 different comparisons and I believe 10 accumulatorws.
Posted by: Fred Woffenden at June 30, 2004 04:39 PM | Link to CommentIn our case the files were organized into Progrem Files in one section of discs, Custommer files in another section and product info in a third. We controlled the address and file confiruration and assigned the addresses. A catalogue was issued showing the Part Number (disk address) and product description and a list of the customers with their addresses. Ship to Addresses were puncheed into punched cards. The first 2 colums of each card had a numeric digit. The operation system would read these and select the program that would process the info. Before each read and after each write the system would check to see if there was an inquiry.
Programming consisted of a coded, I thing, 6 or 7 charter instruction, the 7th digit was used to test for comparison or accumulator conditions. This told the machine to go to the control panel to find out what to do based on the result. There was room for 10 different comparisons and I believe 10 accumulatorws.
Posted by: Fred Woffenden at June 30, 2004 04:39 PM | Link to CommentFred, thanks for all this--not too late at all. I find the interaction between storage media (tape, cards, disk) particularly fascinating.
Posted by: MGK at June 30, 2004 08:16 PM | Link to CommentYou may want to look at a disc filing method called 'Index Sequential Access Method' developed by IBM in later uses of disc files used on their 360 and 370 mainframes.
Posted by: Fred Woffenden at July 5, 2004 09:56 AM | Link to CommentYou may want to look at a disc filing method called 'Index Sequential Access Method' developed by IBM in later uses of disc files used on their 360 and 370 mainframes.
Posted by: Fred Woffenden at July 5, 2004 09:56 AM | Link to Comment