11 Jun
2026
11 Jun
'26
8:06 a.m.
On Jun 10, 2026, at 10:37 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
CDC did that first, with the 6603 in 1964 or so, giving them a crazy high data rate for
the time. I think it was 12 bits parallel per track (matching the PPU word width) but
perhaps it wasn't quite that many.
I vaguely remember that Cray did the same thing with the Cray-1.
paul
One peculiar aspect of the RAMAC is that it only
had one head, or one pair, so track switching was a lot slower than cylinder switching: it
had to retract all the way, then move the head vertically to the correct track, then seek
in again to the right cylinder.
As opposed to ST225, with 4 heads for one platter. :-)