In a similar sense, this is one of my favorite historical photos. A nuclear reactor delivered by steam locomotive!
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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I just purchased a 28TB hard drive for ~~$230~~ $330. It would have taken 5.6 million of these IBM 350 units to equal that.
To put it into perspective, that would be more than 2 football fields in height, width, and depth (725ft³). And buying all of those units would have cost $896 billion in 1956. Adjusted for inflation that's $10.48 trillion.
Edit: Sorry to get anyone's hopes up. I mistyped $330 but if you're wanting to get a mass storage drive at the price I did, I got it from Server Part Deals on eBay. They're manufacturer recertified so essentially brand new and come with a 2 year warranty. (At least mine did.) My drive had 3 hours of spin time and had been spun up 4 times according to the drive health report. The way they can sell these for so cheap is by buying deprecated spares from massive data centers in bulk and recertifying them to resell.
Don't trust that drive.
I mistyped. It was $330 and it's a manufacturer recertified drive with a 2 year warranty and was only spinning for 3 hours and spun up 4 times. So I don't plan on it failing for awhile. I'll eventually buy more in the future so they can be configured for RAID.
I just lost a 12TB Toshiba X300 that was mere months out of its 2 year warranty. Never spin up a single drive! They will always make you wish you mirrored, one day.
RAID is still no replacement for a backup. Single drives are fine as long as you have automated backups and can handle the interruption when someone goes wrong.
!remindme 1 year 10 months
where you get that deal??
Best take
Sorry, check my edit!
But of trivia about the first IBM hard drive: the heads weighed about 8g each and were glued to the actuator arms. The platters needed periodic cleaning, but the cleaning agent dissolved the glue holding the heads. The heads would break free from the arms and adhere to the platter. The rotation speed would accelerate the head outward, and the head would exit the housing with the approximate kinetic energy of a 9mm bullet.
Even in the 80s when I was a fresh-faced young programmer the hard drives we had in the computer room were the size of washing machines. I don't remember how much data they held but it was 100MB or less. A disk pack was a stack of disks more than a foot in diameter, stacked on a hub, with gaps for the read/write heads to reach in. The pack had a clear plastic cover, like for a big cake. You would lower it into the drive, twist the handle to lock it in, pull out the cover and close the lid, just like on a washing machine.
Yes kids, before color TV was commonplace people would stand around and watch cargo get loaded for fun. It was a dark time in entertainment history.
This honestly just makes me wonder how chill a workday was if three whole buildings of office drones could empty into the streets to watch them load this for two hours.
My brother in christ, you have no idea. The rise of the computer age and needing round the clock support for all that entails has really done a number on the working class. I am old enough to remember how chill work environments in the 80's and early 90's were. (Everyone smoking indoors sucked, though)
I considered editing my comment to reference the rampant secondhand smoke.
But yeah I just interviewed for a position with an on-call rotation. I asked them about sleeping hours, and then I asked them about attendance expectations in the face of a midnight emergency. They just blinked at me.
Good luck to you man. I went through that for a long time but those days are behind me now.
The invention of clocks ruined the workday as well.
Hey if someone told me I could go see the 2025 equivalent of this hard drive being unloaded if probably go take a look.
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Tbh they could be waiting for the path to clear so they could get past
Cute how the IBM logo basically hasn't changed
Fun fact: it used to have 13 bars, but changed to the current 8 because 13 bars could not be made pretty on (8-pin) matrix printers.
Fun fact: exactly once, the team organising IBM's participation in the Copenhagen Pride parade got away with wearing t-shirts with the bars printed in the rainbow colours. Immediately after, they were notified that such alterations to corporate branding was unacceptable.
^(I cherry the two shirts I still have.)
There once was an official IBM logo issued in rainbow colours in 2017:
https://page-online.de/kreation/wie-man-mit-einem-logo-politisch-farbe-bekennt-zeigt-ibm/
As you can see from the sign, hard drive parking had not yet been invented.
What would have happened if we just dropped a 20tb hard drive in front of the computer researchers of that time?
World war? Aliens? Or just trashed due to how advanced the tech in it would be to them? Yeah, I think the last.
What would have happened if we just dropped a 20tb hard drive in front of the computer researchers of that time?
Nothing, they would have no idea what it was, or how to interface with it. They might even end up destroying it because they have no idea of the power requirements. Even if they managed to get it powered up and guessed at what it was for, they would still be stuck with the issue of not having an operating system which is capable of logically addressing all of the storage. And the lack of drivers would make that even harder.
A lot of modern technology sits atop a mountain of other modern technology which must be sorted out before you can even start to think about designing the end product. It could be that, since they knew what was possible, and had an example to crib off of, scientists and engineers could have gotten to that point faster. But, there is just an insane amount of prior tech in front of modern computers that any one piece of it, thrown back that far, would likely just be shiny junk.
One of my favorite things about what you are saying is modern transistor gates are smaller than microscope resolution at the time. Even if they could recognize an integrated circuit it would be another 10-20 years before they could even start to reverse engineer it.
The power requirements are printed right on the label tho…also they had x-rays back then too.
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Printed circuit boards were becoming "commonplace" (according to Wikipedia) and the transistor had been invented about 9 years before, so they'd probably be able to figure out at least conceptually what they were looking at. In other words, it's not as if it would seem like a magical rock etched with runes or something, like it would if you showed it to somebody from 1556.
Therefore, I think they'd get out a microscope and oscilloscope and start trying to reverse-engineer it. Probably speed up the development of computer technology quite a bit, by giving them clues on what direction to go.
Therefore, I think they'd get out a microscope and oscilloscope and start trying to reverse-engineer it. Probably speed up the development of computer technology quite a bit, by giving them clues on what direction to go.
Knowing what something is doesn't necessarily teach people how it was made. No matter how much you examine a sheet of printed paper, someone with no conception of a laser printer would not be able to derive that much information about how something could have produced such precise, sharp text on a page. They'd be stuck thinking about movable metal type dipped in ink, not lasers burning powdered toner onto a page.
If you took a modern finFET chip from, say, the TSMC 5nm process nodes, and gave it to electrical engineers of 1995, they'd be really impressed with the physical three dimensional structure of the transistors. They could probably envision how computers make it possible to design those chips. But they'd had no conception of how to make EUV at wavelengths necessary to make the photolithography possible at those sizes. No amount of the examination of the chip itself will reveal the secrets of how it was made: very bright lasers pointed at an impossibly precise stream of liquid tin droplets against highly polished mirrors that focus that EUV radiation against the silicon and masks that make the 2-dimensional planar pattern, then advanced techniques for lining up 2-dimensional features into a three dimensional stack.
It's kinda like how we don't actually know how Roman concrete or Damascus steel was made. We can actually make better concrete and steel today, but we haven't been able to reverse engineer how they made those materials in ancient times.
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Look at that back form, my gosh.
From that, to 1 TB on a microSD the size of a fingernail. Impressive!
It's doubled, we have 2 TB cards now
If random source is to be trusted, it cost $34,500 in 1957. You could lease it for $3,200/month. The 2TB card is $180 in 2025.
Adjusted for 2025:
2TB MicroSD: $180
5MB HDD: $398,852.50 or $36,995.01/month
Adjusted for 1957:
2TB MicroSD: $15.70
5MB HDD: $34,500 or $3,200/month
What a bizarre method of loading! Had to look when forklifts were invented, turns out there were in common use during WWII. I'm not too hot of a driver, but throw that thing on a pallet and I'd have it in there is a minute flat.
Imagine what a HDD of that size could store today.
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