1956: It's time to roll out this new thing called a hard disc drive

h/t Charles Lipson, who reports that the IBM hard disk drive in this photo had 5 Megabyte Hard Drive.

Here is another photo of the 5 megabyte unit being shipped.

Yes, that is one hard disk drive unit.

The first hard disk drive, the IBM Model 350 Disk File we mentioned above, wasn’t something you got as a stand-alone unit. It wasn’t even something you bought. Instead you could lease the IBM 305 RAMAC computer that came with the 350 Disk File for $3,200 per month. Needless to say, back in ‘50s this was a lot more money than it is now.

Considering that we now have tiny, cheap USB sticks that can hold up to 64 GB of data, which is about 1,600 times more than a normal hard disk drive in 1990 (40 MB), and 12,800 times more than the first consumer hard disk drive in 1980, things have certainly moved forward.

And just like we are now looking back and shaking our heads at the amazing difference between now and a few decades ago, we will, thirty or so years from now, look back at 2010 and shake our heads with similar amazement. “Was storage really that primitive back then?”

Read more here.