Comment by vertnerd

I worked on a PC/DOS based instrument for testing permanent magnets back in the 80s. Because of all the magnets involved, we used a battery-backed Static RAM disk instead of a conventional hard drive. The "disk" consisted of a cartridge that plugged into an ISA expansion card in the PC. It was crazy expensive if I remember correctly. One of my contributions to the project was demonstrating that a conventional hard drive inside a steel computer case was actually quite invulnerable to the stray magnetic fields that we were working with. We could forgo the extra cost of the SRAM disk.

We also used a crazy expensive plasma display for the monitor, which turned out to be overkill. But that's a story for another time.