Does it come in avacado?

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 11, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 6 comments


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5MB Hard Disk in 1956 – The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. Let us start appreciating your 4 GB jump drive!

Hat Tip: James Hudnall

 


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6 thoughts on “Does it come in avacado?

  1. I remember when I bought my first PC, a 286 with a 40 Meg drive. I added a second 40 meg drive and thought, “I’ll never need any more storage than that.”

  2. Heather says:

    Oooo. I have heard the “I’ll NEVER use all this space” so many times from Shamus!

    Shamus this is awesome. Rachel and I were just discussing my trip to NASA in 1980 and how there was a room full of 1 computer. I was trying to explain this concept to her so this was very opportune. I showed her this and pointed out that you can get a 1 Gig USB drive a little bigger than her finger. She thought that was hilarious.

  3. Shamus says:

    Imagine if technology had remained like this, but the home computer revolution happened anyway. Then you might hear people saying things like:

    We just got new furniture, so we really ought to get the hard drive re-upholstered.

  4. refugee says:

    “…hard-drive re-upholstered…”

    Oh, like this?

  5. Robert says:

    286 with a 40 MEG hard drive? You were soooo spoiled. My first was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 4K (!) of ram. Ran at 1 (ONE) MHZ. If you pressed the “keyboard” the screen blinked because the CPU could either read the keyboard or draw the screen but not both at once.

    We saved our data on TAPE…like REAL programmers. That’s not that fancy reel to reel stuff..oh no…that's audio cassette tape son. If you stretched the tape a bit you lost your app. Only 5 minutes to load 4K if the machine didn't throw a fit and force a rewind and do-over.

    Geez…I feel old now…

  6. Tacoma says:

    You young’uns with your fancy ELECTRICITY. Back in the day we had to train elephants to pull ropes while blast furnaces around them ran the fans to keep them cool. All this in a basement under a warehouse floor. On the ground floor you had six hundred men throwing red-hot wrought iron switches and loading stone weights into ascending wicker baskets. On the second floor were the vats of oil hooked up to heat sinks. On the roof was the “computing shack” where a single clerk sat at a typewriter and typed commands which he sent down through pneumatic tubes pressurized by boys working the bellows on the roof of the haberdasher’s next door.

    Back in those days we were able to perform six hundred calculations per day. That’s three shifts of people working day and night (six shifts of elephants and four and a half shifts of bellows boys).

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