Two MP3s, Circa 1956 (An IBM 350 drive capable of about 5 MB of storage.)
800,000 MP3s Circa 2010 2014? – see the comments.
Hat tip Boing Boing and Alex in the comments.
Two MP3s, Circa 1956
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I am constantly comparing current hard drive prices to the first one I worked with — a 5MB Hewlett Packard box about the size of a large PC chassis. It was 1982 and cost $5,000 (I am not that old).
MB, not Mb.
Mega bytes, not Mega bits.
WOW
Wait a minute, when did we get actual 2TB SD cards? I know that the XC spec theoretically allows for up to 2TB of storage, but have any actually been manufactured?
Not even. That “2 TB” label is too large by two orders of magnitude.
Yup, looks like 64 GB, or 25, 600 MP3s is biggest available today. I’ll leave it up. It will be accurate soon enough.
I’m not ancient, and we had to manhandle a VAX 250MB drive into our server room and onto a machine around 1990. It wasn’t state-of-the-art even in those days, but it was still “current” enough for us to not want to buy a new one.
It took five (not-so) strapping CS grad students to lift and mount the thing, which weighed about 300 pounds…
Hey, cool, thanks Alex. I kinda want to stand by my claim, in the sense that I originally meant it. I’ve read that 1TB cards in the new SDXC format should be on the market by the end of this year (see here, e.g.), so I figured there should be examples of 2TB cards in the lab already, certainly within the year. But maybe that’s apples and oranges, since the IBM drive was already on the market.
To provide an Econ connection here: Clayton Christiansen has studied the hard drive industry, deeming it the fruit fly of Economics for its crazy-fast development cycle, which makes it much easier to study than many other industries, where you often have to wait for generations to see radical change. Clearly, flash memory is much the same.
My first work PC – 1986 – had a 10MB hard drive and dual 5.25 floppies. Never thought I would use all that disk space.
It is amazing to look at these changes, but a doubling of capacity never even comes close to doubling functionality. In 1986 I bought my first PC with a 20Mb hard drive (an xt clone with 640k of RAM, that is .64Mb of RAM or .00064Gb of RAM!), and I had people asking me why I didn’t go with the cheaper 10Mb hard drive model, since I would never fill the 20Mb drive. Sure enough, I never filled it up, using it until 1993, including a 180 page dissertation. Around the same time that I bought that amazing machine, my sister bought a laptop (an IBM) that had _no_ hard drive, just two floppy drives. She might have written her dissertation on that one, but I can’t remember.
I’m not ancient, and we had to manhandle a VAX 250MB drive into our server room and onto a machine around 1990. It wasn’t state-of-the-art even in those days, but it was still “current” enough for us to not want to buy a new one.
The really interesting thing to me is how much slower the improvement in hard drives has been than other components. In hindsight the reasons are obvious, but if you’d asked me to estimate the size of a 5 MB HD in 1956 I would have guessed something far larger than that. And, heck, even if I’d realized why it wouldn’t have been as large as I expected, I would have guessed something maybe 4 times as large as that.
I used my father’s work computer to play games. I had to uninstall the operating system every time I wanted to play to free up the hard drive space to install the game. When I was done I had to uninstall the game and reinstall the OS. That even sounds wrong to me, but that’s what I remember.
This is amazing and makes you think what will happen in the future. It had huge storage and the song he songs on the IBM.
I recall the Byte magazine review of a ‘huge’ (10MB, I think) hard disk. The reviewer couldn’t think of anything to fill it with (in order to check that you could actually write that many characters to the disk), so he wrote a special program to fill it up with asterisks.
I still distinctly remember when one day at my job they replaced two refrigerator-sized VAXs with something about the size of a toaster, and several thousand times more powerful. Freed up a lot of space, reduced the air conditioning bill.
DP Roberts: I wouldn’t hold my breath for MRAM “taking over”. How long has that been promised? Yeah, a while. I remember when bubble memory was going to take over, too… and that sure never happened.
Nor is there something magical about China and rare-earths. They simply undercut everyone in the 90s, and combined with environmentalist overreaction (“zomg radioactive waste!”), other mines shut down.
As demand increases, prices will go up, and so will the profitability of … non-Chinese sources.
(And presumably governments will realize that radioactive tailings that are… no more radioactive than the source ore, aren’t actually particularly dangerous…)
It’s almost like markets work, or something like that.
Andrew: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a semi trailer filled with DVDs”, as we say.
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