In 1956, the RAMAC 305 stored 5 million characters. Today, hard drives store as much as 3TB of data and solid-state technology is quickly approaching a terabyte of storage in a single solid-state drive

One of the museum's alcoves is dedicated to memory and storage systems because, while the semiconductor industry gets most of the credit for advances in computing through the years, storage -- both short-term memory and disk drives -- is the unsung hero of modern technology, according to Spicer.

"Without large storage systems you wouldn't have e-commerce, because all those giant Web sites that handle your transactions wouldn't exist," he said in a recent interview. "Google needs cheap, fast, reliable storage to process requests."

Al Hoagland, who during his 28 years at IBM helped to create the world's first disk drives exclusively for the RAMAC, remembers when few people thought disk drives had a future. Back then, around 1956, it took three technicians to run the RAMAC: one person for the processors, one for storage and another for the memory system. (Random-access memory, or RAM, technology then consisted of magnetic core memory, which was essentially a matrix of wires with small iron donuts attached to them.)

"I never saw anything that could compete with a disk drive, but I couldn't have forecast where it went," Hoagland said.