We quickly get used to the latest technology and forget how fast things are moving and how amazing everything is.
So it's helpful to occasionally be reminded.
This is a picture of an IBM hard drive being loaded onto an airplane in 1956. According to $4, which tweeted the picture, it's a 5 mega-byte drive, and it weighed more than 2,000 pounds.
To put that in context, 55 years later, the weakest iPhone 5S has a 16 gigabyte drive, about 3,200-times as big. And it weighs a quarter of a pound. The IBM hard drive could have stored exactly one iPhone picture, and nothing more.
$4 suggests that the drive is an IBM 350, which was announced in 1956 and, $4, actually only had 3.75 megabytes of storage. Also per Wikipedia, the 350 was available for rent...for $3,200 per month. Here's how it worked:
Its design was motivated by the need for real time accounting in business. The 350 stored 5 million 6 characters (3.75 $4).$4 It had fifty 24-$4 (610 $4) diameter disks with 100 recording surfaces. Each surface had 100 tracks. The disks spun at 1200 $4. Data transfer rate was 8,800 characters per second. An access mechanism moved a pair of heads up and down to select a disk pair (one down surface and one up surface) and in and out to select a recording track of a surface pair. Several improved models were added in the 1950s. The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for $3,200 per month. The 350 was officially withdrawn in 1969.
It will be interesting to see where we are in another 55 years.
SEE ALSO: $4