Something sassy
Aww, ain’t she purty.
Very sleek, yes.
Enough to knock your caps off.
She’s got 5 megabytes, Chuck.
5 million alphanumeric characters.
’pparently IBM reckons they got no way to sell one with more.
Chuck clicks in appreciation.
6 bits for each character. With a parity bit!
Right, right.
Takes only point-six seconds to locate a record.
Imagine what you could do with that!
Footnotes
In 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive. The hard drive unit weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data. It was moved about with a forklift and large cargo aircraft.
Think of this next time you look at your 8Gb USB stick.
All factoids for the dialogue are lifted from the wikipedia entry. (Hey! – it’s a lazy Sunday piece written while watching a movie.)
My first computer with a hard disk was a IBM PC clone. Before that I owned an Apple ][e clone that used a consumer tape player as it’s external storage.
My original source for the photograph was a re-tweet by @dgmacarthur of a tweet by Rich Powell (@cultmojo).
Other articles on Code for life:
Consumer brain-computer interface
2 Responses to “Something sassy”
It’s almost frightening how compact memory has become. From this behemoth and “No-one will ever need more than 64kB of storage” to a micro SD card that can hold 256GB (and growing…) on something the size of a fingernail. We are living in the future!
Somehow I don’t think I’d be putting one of those 1956 era disks in my pocket! 🙂
You’re right there are larger-capacity cards – I used the 8Gb example as one even your typical home user would have.