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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of RAM, I was recently researching the vintage IBM 650 computer (1953) ... but this RAM was actually a hard disk.

Actually it was a drum. No moving arms at all, but some tracks had multiple read/write heads to reduce access time.

Knuth's high school science fair project was to write an angular optimizing assembler for the IBM 650, called SOAP III.

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Actually, no :-) The 650 had a drum for main storage. The "355 Random Access Memory" was something different, an optional hard drive peripheral, which IBM literally called "RAM" (see the link above). This became the RAMAC system.

Right, you could add a RAMAC disk, but that was a very expensive option. Many universities had IBM 650s, but usually without the RAMAC.

The 650 main memory was a drum; but what IBM called Random Access Memory (and RAM) for this machine was a hard drive. As described in the Manual of Operation linked above. Here are a few quotes:

"Records in the IBM Random Access Memory Unit are stored on the faces of magnetic disks."

"The stored data in the Random Access Memory Unit are read and written by access arms."

"The IBM 355 RAM units provide extemely large storage capacity for data... Up to four RAM units can be attached to the 650 to provide 24,000,000 digits of RAM storage."

The main memory on the other hand: "The 20,000 digits of storage, arranges as 2000 words of memory on the magnetic drum..."

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