In light of humpday, here’s one from LONG ago…
Anybody got a clue??? Answer is below the fold…
It’s a hard disk drive back in 1956… With 5 MB of storage.
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first “SUPER” computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored a “whopping” 5 MB of data. As an oh by the way, they leased for $3200 per MONTH back in 1956…
Do you appreciate your 16 GB memory stick a little more now?
P.S. It would take 3200 of those units to equal the capacity of that little 16-Gig stick plugged into the side of your PC that costs $12…
h/t JP
Times have changed.
When I saw the first Motorola flip phone and understood that it was a take-off from Star Trek, I knew that things were going to get interesting.
So, is that the first time computers were used on aircraft? Only 4 passengers plus the computer. So they set it aside for another 40 years.
IIRC, that’s about 10MB worth of storage.
Here’s another good pic:
http://www.techamok.com/pics/07/sep/1gb.jpg
Both items in ^^ that photo represent 1 GB of memory.
Cool photo. Puts it in perspective.
When I first started working we rented processing time on a Smithsonian computer. We were SO excited when we got the first computer all our own – it had KILOBYTES of storage, whoohoo!
On the local talk show last night, the reminded us that in 1969, NASA sent men to the moon on 8MB of ram.
Coffeepot — pretty sure they were _shipping_ it, not _installing_ it. That’s the cargo hold of a freight bird, and it’s still packed for shipping.
Don’t think an airliner of that day had the electrical generation to RUN a computer that would use that drive. Certainly couldn’t afford to lift the techs and programming staff necessary to USE it. Ain’t just an oversized TRaSh-80, you know. LOL
No matter how far technology goes, we still have GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
LL- Yep!!!
CP- Nah, transporting it via acft.
Jeff- Good ones, thanks!
Opus- Yes it does! And proves Moore’s Law is alive and well!
PH- You’re not THAT old… 😀
Robert- Yep, and it WORKED!!!
Geod- Good point!
WSF- Yep, just now MOAR of it!!! And faster too!!!
Wasn’t it William Gibson who said “The future is already here. It just isn’t equally distributed”?
This just exemplifies a point that constantly tickles me. I put a 64GB MicroSD card in my phone, almost thirteen-thousand times the capacity of that drive. And, at .4 gram, it weighs over two million times less. At the risk of publicizing my age, when I was in junior high, a friend of mine installed a 10GB hard drive in his computer. My dad commented that it was impossible to save enough files to fill that up. At this point, I have over 180GB used on my hard drive of music alone. Watching the times change is a lot of fun.