Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mishlert]

In 1956, the first hard drive was two refrigerators wide and stored the equivalent of one MP3 song.
Article

[Demophobe]

The 350 Disk File consisted of a stack of fifty 24" discs that can be seen to the left of the operator in the above picture. The capacity of the entire disk file was 5 million 7-bit characters, which works out to about 4.4 MB in modern parlance. This is about the same capacity as the first personal computer hard drives that appeared in the early 1980's, but was an enormous capacity for 1956. IBM leased the 350 Disk File for a $35,000 annual fee.

[mindmetoo]

I think the first hard drive I ever used was in the late '70s at my father's lab. It was about 6 large pizza sized plates contained in a plastic UFO enclosure. It held about 5 megabytes. A real upgrade from my father's first computer that had about 8K of magnetic core memory.