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The 305 RAMAC — First Commercial Hard Drive
Captain DaFt writes "Snopes.com has an article that gives an interesting look back at the first commercial hard drive, the IBM 350. Twice as big as a refrigerator and weighing in at a ton, it packed a whopping 4.4MB! Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us have on our keychains today."
It was all so very long ago, those neurons are getting a little rusty. :-P
Why back in my day, boy, we measured frequency in seconds per cycle and we liked it!
The enemies of Democracy are
You can't get a 20GB HD for $20 but you can get a 1GB HD-like system for $20.
Hard disks consist of a fixed cost bit (the general hardware) and a "gets better with every new generation without costing more" part (the density of the data on the platters.) As a result, it'll always cost something in the region of $100 for the low end devices.
Flash memory on the other hand seems to be more linear with the material costs of the devices being miniscule and pretty much the entire expense being related to the density of the storage. So if you wait long enough, a $20 20G drive will turn up. It'll just take longer because flash costs more per-byte than magnetic disks.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Actually, there is:
http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Movies-n-Sounds.html
You will see the thing running!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress, that would be an undetermined size in excess of 20 TB. The text alone would total 17-20 TB and that doesn't include the photos, sculptures, or sound recordings.
We had to write the program, then IMAGINE how it would run!
You had imagination?! Spoiled brat!
Haha, we could go on all day. I think the best part of this thread is the "informative" mod on my first post.
The enemies of Democracy are