Drum memory

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Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. Many early computers, called drum computers or drum machines, used drum memory as the main memory of the computer. These machines were quite slow, as the instructions and data had to be read and performed at the rotational speed of the drum. They were, however, much less expensive than machines that offered some form of high-speed memory, like Williams tubes or delay lines. Drums were also used as high-speed secondary storage, like the various IBM drum storage drives, and the UNIVAC Flying head and FASTRAND series of drums. Through the early 1960s, core memory dramatically improved in terms of both density and price, and the use of drums, and most other systems, as main memory rapidly fell off. Drums were then replaced by hard disk drives for secondary storage, which were somewhat slower but both less expensive and offered...

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