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. Do you appreciate your 8 GB memory stick a little more now?

1 comment:

Steve Hull, MA said...

In the late 1970s I purchased my first personal computer, before the IBM PC was invented. There were no applications. If you wanted it to do anything you had to program it. If the memory in my present computer cost what the memory in that one did, the present computer would have cost several hundred million dollars.

So what? What fundamental cultural advances do we have to show for it?