Kids These Days

[madbaker]

from the Wall Street Journal:

"2006 marks the 50th anniversary of the hard-disk drive. The first disk drive, called the RAMAC, was created by IBM engineers in San Jose, CA in 1956.

"What was the RAMAC like? The disks on it were 24 inches in diameter. The whole unit weighed over a ton, and had to be delivered on forklifts and loaded on to large cargo bays of airplanes. You had only five megabytes of storage. That's about five minutes' worth of MP3 music.

"Couldn't they have increased the storage? The limitation was the marketing department. The people in marketing said they didn't know how to sell a product with more than five megabytes of storage, so at first they didn't make them."

They left out the part about having to walk uphill in the snow to manually enter the punch cards. And we liked it!

Comments

[tshuma]

It took a fair number of punch cards to fill up 5 megs.

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

Not to mention having to punch the cards with a wooden stick, because we didn't have any other way to do it, and we LIKED IT!