r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Uguero • 17d ago

of a storage unit

Post image

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.

10.1k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

View all comments

760

u/Happy_dadpete 17d ago

Jesus Christ we’ve come a long way

355

u/Phenomenal_Hoot 17d ago

No joke. There was a time powerful computers took up a whole ass big room. Now the phone you’re looking at this on is like 100x those computers.

8

u/Due_Young_9344 16d ago

imagine going back in time with a mobile phone and future internet in the 1980s

5

u/Phenomenal_Hoot 16d ago

You’d be king in like a week lmao.

2

u/duckweedlagoon 16d ago

Yeah, I think they covered that in a few episodes of Doctor Who. It's a futuristic episode but "The Long Game" (S1E7, 2005, Eccleston) comes to mind

1

u/Due_Young_9344 15d ago

oh nice, I've never watched Doctor Who, is it good?

1

u/duckweedlagoon 15d ago

Absolutely!

I totally recommend starting the New Who series (2005) with Eccleston's Doctor (Nine) because he establishes so much back story you miss out on if you skip straight to Ten

And if you're looking for other good sci-fi, Babylon 5

Cannot say enough good things about it but the best is that it gets better with every rewatch. It's the best