"The first industrial digital computer based control system was the catalytic polymerisation unit of the Port Arthur (Texas) plant of the Texaco Company which went on-line in March 1959. It used a Ramo- Wooldridge RW-300 computer and had 103 process measurements and 14 control outputs of which five, controlling the reactor feed valves, were direct digital control outputs, all the other outputs were set point adjustments for analogue controllers. The Ramo- Wooldridge Company, an advanced scientific and engineering services company, had been involved since 1953 in the USAF ballistic missile programme, but was looking to diversify into civil applications and had initiated the project with the Texaco company in 1956. In 1958 it merged with Thompson Products, a supplier of precision parts for automobiles and aircraft, to form the Thompson- Ramo-Wooldridge Company and this company remained until the mid-1960s the major supplier of digital computers and computer control systems for industrial applications." (stuart bennett, who is giving credits to stout and williams.)

more to store. also on storage

fred langa traces in his articel the lineage of hard drives back to 1952: to ibm "nrz", "none-return-to-zero" encoding.

ramac, "random access method of accounting and control" was introduced by ibm september 13, 1956. the system used fifty metallic disks, each 1meter in diameter, tells gene franklin. the storage capacity was 5 megabytes. to reach that, they had to built a device in the size of a closet. when they turned it on, the whole box was shaking like a washing machine, franklin says. engineers at that time suggested the usage of a short wire. for saftey reasons. or - to put it in a historic folkloric way - to keep it from walking out the door.

the RAMAC had a servo system to move the actuator vertically and radially. the position were "detected" by detent marks on the actuators.The early comb actuators were hydraulic until IBM introduced the first voice coil motor in a drive in 1965 (Daniel Abramovitch and Gene Franklin, A brief history of disk drive control, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, June 2002)

storage space and price over the years.

i wanna have: computers. an illustrated history