• 1967

Hardware Description

The IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System, or PDSS, was an online archival storage system for large data centers. It was the first storage device designed from the start to hold a terabit of data (about 160 GB). The 1360 stored data on index card sized pieces of stiff photographic film that were individually retrieved and read, and could be updated by copying data, with changes, to a new card.Only six PDSS's were constructed, including the prototype, and IBM abandoned the film-card system and moved onto other storage systems soon after. Only one similar commercial system seems to have been developed, the Foto-Mem FM 390, from the late 1960s.