r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Uguero • 17d ago
of a storage unit
In 1956, IBM shipped a 5MB hard drive... and it weighed over a ton. Yep, just 5 megabytes required a forklift and a cargo plane. Today, that's not even one iPhone photo.
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u/Balbar0 17d ago
Then: ⬆️
Now:
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u/AdventuresofBumpo 17d ago
Just imagine AI in this context, we’re so fucking cooked
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u/kilobyte2696 16d ago
what need is there to bring ai into this? why cant we just talk about the wonders of modern electronic data storage
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u/-Benjamin_Dover- 16d ago
Isnt it obvious? If its technology related in any way, shape, or form, then AI needs to be mentioned. No exceptions.
Sarcasm, if its not obvious.
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u/Patchy97 16d ago
5MB sounds tiny now, but it was genuinely useful because it wasn’t meant for files like today—it stored highly structured business data (account records, inventory, payroll, etc.). That kind of data is extremely compact, so 5MB could hold something like tens of thousands of business records, which roughly translated to tens of thousands of pages of paperwork or dozens of filing cabinets.
The real breakthrough wasn’t just storage size, though, t was the random access element. Instead of flipping through punch cards or scanning magnetic tape sequentially, you could actually jump straight to a record. For 1950s businesses, that meant “instant lookup” of customer accounts, inventory, etc., which was a huge deal.
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u/Positive_Conflict_26 16d ago edited 16d ago
You can roughly fit 55,000,000 of these in the palm of your hand today. (Talking about 250-300tb ssd drives)
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u/bromoloptaleina 16d ago
You can fit 3.2 million of these on a drive the size of a chewing gum
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u/Kid_Vid 16d ago
Is that a scam link?? Not that you are scamming.
I get it is amazon... But $21,000???? For 16tb??
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u/bromoloptaleina 16d ago
It’s the first and only 16tb nvme ssd. HDD are way cheaper but way slower.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina 16d ago
Sadly, Solid State Drive Drives do not provide the redundancy their name might lead one to expect!
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u/Bright-Data-6942 16d ago
Imagine the size of this with current storage unit.
How many can you store? 1 Exabyte? 1 Zettabyte?
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u/zzen11223344 16d ago
I do not think this is actually a hard disc drive. In 1956, it is a magnetic core memory / storage.
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u/Chaneera 16d ago
It's a disk. IBM 350. Introduced in '56.
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u/Few-Issue-5010 16d ago
Yes, this photo was in Bogotá (Colombia) and the buyer was the Republic Bank of the Nation. The year is 1956 in fact.
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u/Treveli 16d ago
Saw a pic like this years ago and did some amature math for 1 ton of modern 1 or 2 TB flash drives. And that it would be a couple hundred petabytes of storage, with current tech. Which helped me understand why, in Star Trek, the ship's computers seem to have not just the sum total of Earth knowledge, but the total knowledge of the entire Federation, and thousands of worlds beyond.
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u/Morgannin09 16d ago
Nowadays it's possible to put 1 million times that amount of memory through the wash because you forgot it was in your pocket.
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u/Tajandoen 16d ago
My old piano removalists once had a line in moving computer hardware, because, like pianos, they were bulky and heavy yet fragile. It seems the techniques for huge musical instruments were not so different to those for huge pieces of computing equipment.
Their old truck even had "Piano and Computer Removalists" down its sides in very faded paint.
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u/RecentQuarter 16d ago
Where’s OSHA?
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u/duckweedlagoon 15d ago
This was in 1956. OSHA wasn't formed 1971. Obviously, they were still caught up in the forming committee 😉
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u/theneighborupstairs 16d ago
Man look at those essential workers just going to town with their essential work. Fast forward to now and we're sucking water out of rivers to cool servers that are hot from making fruit and vegetable cheating edits. Meowmeow mememeowmeow.
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u/racebanyn 16d ago
“Yes Sir Gentlemen…. That right there will not only store the cover page of your thesis paper but also the table of contents!!”
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u/AsterSkotos24 15d ago
And this digital image is roughly 1MB. Five of these images could fit in there and nothing more
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16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Total_Job29 16d ago
2x what it is today.
Apple just bumped it to 2x the previous amount. That was in place for 6 years.
So on that basis in 10 years time the base iPhone storage will be 512GB
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u/mrdude05 16d ago
We're nearing the physical limits of how small transistors can get, so the the rate of growth is slowing down. Storage won't change by orders of magnitude over a few years like it did in the past
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u/Uranium-Sandwich657 16d ago
Not to mention we're reaching the point of diminishing returns. Video games take forever to develop nowadays, we have cloud capabilities, and the graphical improvements are borderline indistinguishable.
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u/Happy_dadpete 17d ago
Jesus Christ we’ve come a long way