2016 will be 60 years
since the first Hard Disk was invented. A whopping 5 megabytes was in the form of a box the size of a San Francisco apartment.
Here it is being loaded on a plane in 1956:
It is difficult for most of us to relate to the large numbers that describe computer storage.
Megabytes and Terabytes are terms we commonly throw around to identify how large our hard drives, flash drives and SSD drives are.
For you geeks out there: To put matters into perspective, here is a link to play with the numbers and do your own comparisons: Convert storage Bytes.
It would take 500,000 of the boxes you see pictured here being loaded on this plane to be equal to the size of most hard drives shipping in new computers today! That’s 1/2 Million of these original hard drives stuffed into a single laptop!
One of those great little 8 gigabyte flash drives we have hanging from a keychain (costs about $9) has easily 1,600 times more capacity than the first hard drive!
If these numbers make your head spin, you’re not alone.
I am happy storage keeps getting smaller while the capacity keeps getting larger.
What’s next? Wearable computers? No way. That’s crazy talk!!!