I ran across this amazing picture on Massimo, a splendid site that offers several fascinating and unusual tweets a day. If you like being surprised and astounded, give Massimo a look.
The picture is of the original IBM hard drive. Look at that monster. It took 3 or 4 men just to push it up the ramp into the truck. It looks like it must hold petabytes and petabytes of data but nope: 5 megabytes.
In 1956, IBM’s Data Processing Division in southern San Jose, Ca transported the first hard-drive that only held a whopping 5 megabytes of storage
[read more: https://t.co/Rnpcf7HnYv] pic.twitter.com/GGxuWYMy4b
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 1, 2023
The minions are fond of reminding me of my advancing years but even I’m not old enough to remember this beast. When I started, on a mainframe, the drives were roughly the size of a (small) washing machine. I have no memory of how much data they held but it was surely a lot more than 5 MB.
These days you can wear gigabytes on your wrist so storage capacity is making progress. It would be interesting to know what the clock speed of the computer that giant disk was destined for. I’m pretty sure it would be underwhelming too.