What a Half-Century of Technological Progress Looks Like
July 22nd, 2012 - 4:00 pm
Portable five megabyte hard drive, 1956 edition:
Portable 128 gigabyte USB flash drive, 2012 edition:
Incidentally, the Website with the photo* of the 1956-edition of the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive adds a reminder to readers to “Start appreciating your 1 GB memory stick!”
Only one gig? That page was written in 2008, which is a reminder of how quickly that piece of computer hardware is expanding. Or shrinking. Or both…
* Which has made the rounds over the years. I don’t think I’m copying an image exclusive to them; apologies if so.
I’m thinking that’s a Pan Am Cargo DC-C, the military called them C-118, though I might be wrong. We still have a lot of C-118s flying around rural Alaska hauling all sorts of stuff, though probably not old IBM mainframes unless it is out to the junkyard.
Of course, Pan Am is long gone but it survives here with old-timers who’ll describe a beautiful, cloudless – and rare – day as “Pan Am weather,” the only kind of weather you could actually expect them to operate in when they “served” Alaska.
My first computer had a 3.1 gigabyte hard drive. It cost me nearly $1000 in 1998. I paid less than $20 for a 4Gb thumb drive last year.
My first computer had 16 or 32 KB (?). Whatever, it was xty times more powerful than the recommended “typical” capacity. Today, I buy multi-GB thumb drives and without a second thought give them away to clients, colleagues, godkids, etc.
I paid $3000 for my first computer in 1986 – had a 20 MB (megabyte, not gigabyte) hard drive, 256K (kilo, not mega or giga byte) RAM and a monochrome screen. The CPU in my GPS probably runs rings around the 1986-vintage processor.