Worth remembering for "musem-quality" items is the mid-1960's IBM
random access "data cell", scarcely known and little deployed, that was
like a round carousel juke box that spun hundreds of magnetic strips
around until the chosen one was wrapped around a read/write head from
whence data could be read or to which data could be written. The
device had a capacity of 400 megabytes, far more random access storage
than most shops had online at any given time, and could access any data
in a few seconds. But it was expensive and I suspect attracted little
interest because most applications in those days were happily running
with an input tape, transaction tape or cards, and an output tape, and
companies were only beginning to explore random access files for
certain limited purposes, given the cost per megabyte.
RCA had a version of this type of device, which, under certain
circumstances of motion (back and forth), would inadvertently drop some
of its strips out the back of the machine, and some clever techie
programmed such a sequence and then announced to the operator "I've
lost one of my strips, could you please come over and help me out."
I remember our IBM data cell from a summer job at California Western
States Life Insurance Company in Sacramento in 1966.
It would be fascinating to bring into a musem such a first attempt at
leapfrogging the extremely limited 7 megabyte limitation that most
random access devices (usually removable disk pack drives) had even
into the late 1960's. Like bubble memory, its capabilities were
surpassed by other technological improvements and it never found a
significant niche.
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