Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic RecordingMain MenuAboutAbstract for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PIntroductionIntroduction to Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic RecordingNotesNotes for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PMediaMedia for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PAcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PTechnical InformationTechnical Information for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PReferencesReferences for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PJentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339This essay is part of the “New Media” special issue of American Literature (volume 85, number 4, December 2013). See http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230. Version 1 of the site is (c) 2013 by Duke University Press.
IBM 305 RAMAC: Promotional Material (ca. 1956)
12013-12-19T07:07:36-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca53392493International Business Machines Corporation, Promotional Video for IBM 305 RAMAC (the first commercial computer that used a moving head hard disk drive) (ca. 1956)plain2013-12-27T05:23:09-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339
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12014-01-01T07:00:21-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339The Emergence of the Hard Disk DriveJentery Sayers3On the Importance of the IBM 305 RAMACplain2014-01-01T07:08:20-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339
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12013-11-26T14:30:08-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339MediaJentery Sayers8Media for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U Pplain83872014-01-01T06:54:16-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339
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12013-10-14T12:54:41-07:00Magnetic Storage20On Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Magnetic Recording Researchplain2013-12-26T17:59:13-08:00For a thoroughly materialist approach to the hard drive and contemporary magnetic recording, see Kirschenbaum (2008). In the first chapter, Kirschenbaum claims, quite importantly, that “computer storage media also have their affordances, but as storage in general has become more capacious and less immediately tangible it is easy to overlook them. . . . Attention to the affordances of various kinds of storage media can reveal much about computing in different contexts, allowing us to reconstruct salient aspects of now-obsolete systems and the human practices that attended them” (32).
(This note comments on the page titled, “Prehistory for Today’s Magnetic Media,” as well as the attached video titled, “IBM 305 RAMAC: Promotional Material (ca. 1956).”)
12013-12-12T11:09:43-08:00Prehistory for Today’s Magnetic Media10The Particulars of Magnetic Recording Necessarily Frame Our Understanding of Contemporary Computing and Storageplain2013-12-26T09:14:56-08:00Still, the once-new device helps us better understand how people initially learned to simultaneously ignore, trust, and desire magnetic storage—to examine how faith in magnetic recording emerged between the 1870s and 1910s, well before now-ubiquitous hard drives (not to mention seemingly unlimited cloud storage). Put this way, the story of a failed sound machine offers a prehistory for contemporary computing, invested as it often is in the automagical transubstantiation of magnetic impressions (on platters) into data expressions (on screens and through speakers).
This prehistory matters because it not only contextualizes contemporary computing and today’s magnetic media through mechanical age audio cultures. It also sparks some speculation about what artifacts are not at hand, in the archive, or on file—about what does not ultimately go into storage. If, during the development of early magnetic technologies and media, the perfect record would never lie and would never be written, then we must ask how such a record was actively constructed, through what material procedures of impression and playback, and in what relation to transforming notions of proof, evidence, perception, and memory. To be clear, then, this prehistory is an account of making records, not giving or taking them.