It sold for about $200,000 -- or you could lease it for about $3,200 a month, according to Spicer.

IBM engineer Rey Johnson led a team of 50 -- Hoagland included -- that worked in an 8,000 square-foot building in San Jose developing the RAMAC. At the time, IBM had one of just two tech labs in Silicon Valley; Hewlett-Packard owned the other. Prior to 1952, IBM's technology labs were in New York.

"IBM picked San Jose ... because [it] couldn't hire anyone from the West Coast," Hoagland said. "Because why would you want to go east to work? So they had to find a way to recruit talent on the West Coast. In the next town over, Campbell, they had a punch card plant. So Campbell made it more efficient to get this lab going."

Hoagland is currently finishing a book on 50 years of . He's also involved in for the upcoming Computer History Museum exhibit opening.

"At the time the RAMAC was being worked on, the main systems used punch cards and magnetic tape," said Hoagland. "Some used magnetic drum memory for storage, primarily being pushed by Univac."