The World’s first hard drive
Hard drives have come a long way since IBM’s first creation in 1956. They are WAYYYY smaller for a start!
Your hard drive is the component in your computer where all your data is stored. So when you save a document or a photograph, more than likely, it will be stored on your hard drive. That’s where your operating system and other applications live too.
So imagine the size of your hard drive in your laptop – which is pretty small, isn’t it? Or even a zip/flash drive. Compare that to the monster being loaded onto the airplane in the picture on your left!
This is an IBM hard drive for a RAMAC 305 computer system. It holds just 5 megabytes of data and cost $50,000 US Dollars!
Compare this to an itsy-bitsy zip/flash drive – here’s one (right) that holds 1 terabyte of data and costs around $50 US dollars. Consider that there are 1,000,000 megabytes in a terabyte. So the IBM monster is 5 megabytes, this zip/flash drive is 1,000,000 megabytes – woah!!
