In the 1950s, two IBM engineers built a new way to store computer data on spinning disks; it held 5 million characters and recalled a record in under 1 second

Somewhere between “please don’t lose my file” and “why is my phone begging me to buy more cloud storage” was the rather unglamorous fact that a computer “remembering” something instantaneously, without a person sifting through a filing cabinet, was barely a human lifespan old when it first appeared. It happened with a creation that was the size of two refrigerators, a ton and a half heavy, and held as much information as a single low-resolution image.

According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, engineers William Goddard and John Lynott, with help from Louis Stevens and a wider IBM team up in San Jose during the 1950s, developed a magnetic disk storage device that could store five million characters and recall any individual record in under a second. In 1956, that was pretty astonishing.

The problem (literally) was a filing cabinet

Before then, businesses used punch cards, and if a warehouse needed to update a single record, they would have to have someone go dig through the…