I'm a member of the team that restored this machine--the world's first hard disk drive.

It was announced in 1956 it was the first product of IBM's laboratory in San Jose, California.

This is a big machine with a very small capacity.

However, in 1956 it was very important.

This machine had 50 disks 24 inches in diameter.

It stores a total of 5 million 6-bit characters, 3.75 megabytes in today's world.

Any disk drive that doesn't have at least gigabytes in it is obsolete by modern standards.

It was actually designed to run a request from the Air Force

for storage capacity for their 50,000 spare parts inventory.

It was designed to hold 50,000 character records

with access to any records in less than a second.