[1] The system was publicly announced on September 14, 1956,[2][3] with test units already installed at the U.S. Navy and at private corporations.

[5] RAMAC was developed and manufactured at IBM's research facility in San Jose, California.

This led to a visit by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to IBM's San Jose facility.

The system featured an IBM RAMAC 305 computer, punched card data collection, and a central printing facility.

The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for US$3,200 (equivalent to $34,700 in 2023) per month.

Currie Munce, research vice president for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which has acquired IBM's hard disk drive business), stated in a Wall Street Journal interview[10] that the RAMAC unit weighed over a ton, had to be moved around with forklifts, and was delivered via large cargo airplanes.

Programming the 305 involved not only writing machine language instructions to be stored on the drum memory, but also almost every unit in the system (including the computer itself) could be programmed by inserting wire jumpers into a plugboard control panel.

[4] The 305 was a character-oriented variable "word" length decimal (BCD) computer with a drum memory rotating at 6000 RPM that held 3200 alphanumeric characters.

The 305's instruction set does not include any jumps, instead these are programmed on the control panel: All timing signals for the 305 were derived from a factory recorded clock track on the drum.

The Improved Processing Speed option could be installed that allowed the three instruction phases (IRW) to immediately follow each other instead of waiting for the next revolution to start; with this option and well optimized code and operand placement a typical instruction could execute in as little as one revolution of the drum (10 ms).