In 1956, IBM shipped a 5MB hard drive… and it weighed over a ton. Yep, just 5 megabytes required a forklift and a cargo plane. Today, that’s not even one iPhone photo.
by Uguero
In 1956, IBM shipped a 5MB hard drive… and it weighed over a ton. Yep, just 5 megabytes required a forklift and a cargo plane. Today, that’s not even one iPhone photo.
by Uguero
27 Comments
A single 5 min Hi-Res song from Qobuz is 100 MB.
It is crazy to think 5 MB weighed a ton.
I was in my 20’s when getting 128MB of RAM was breathtaking…
We’re really living in the future
This type of thing didn’t happen in other areas of technology.
The first computer I bought had a 40mb hd. 1 mb of ram. 1990. That thing was a big box!
Humanity really went from ‘needs a forklift’ to ‘lost in couch cushions’ in 70 years
This is what pisses me off about data centers. They are a city large. For how long? Eventually they will be down sized to a fucking hard drives worth of space.
Damn, humans have gotten a lot bigger since then
My 5MB external in ’92 was the size of a shoebox
What it feels like trying to push a commit when GitHub is down.
Doubt that it’s a hard drive. Would be safer to just call it storage
The hell? Vacuum tubes or something?
Adorable
In 1959 I got a free interview trip to the IBM plant in Santa Clara, CA where they were making these things.
I remember when MIT got a brand new 10MB disk for MIT-OZ — they called the device “Kansas” as it was smooth and flat as far as the eye could see. 1980-something
And IBM will say. Heh… u know how much it costs?
Here is the wise thing.
Majority of the phones lie about their resolution.
The image file has that 4k resolution, but the camera does not.
a picture is worth … ~2.5 million WORDs
And now you can fit 200,000 of those in your pinky fingernail.
I remember being excited getting the 16k expansion for my timex Sinclair computer lol
Currently with Dr. Stone
A screenshot of the original Mario game on a modern system is way bigger than the entire original game.
Talk about the build quality 😌
In the summer of 1984, I worked at Radio Shack. The 5MB external hard drive they sold at that time was the size of a desktop PC and cost $3999, which was about half the price of a new Honda Accord at the time.
Those days were so beautiful!!.
All those people died from lung cancer.
For anyone interested in stuff like this, I highly recommend going to your closest computer history museum. They are full of fascinating stuff like this (early hard drives). My favourite example is how RAM used to be *hand woven* with magnets and copper wire. You can literally see *each bit*.