Can you guess what it is they are loading onto the aircraft?

[Larryh86GT]

Can you guess what it is they are loading onto the aircraft?

 

[Larryh86GT]

Hint: The picture was taken in 1956




It is a 5 MB Hard Disk Drive for the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first IBM 'SUPER' computer released in September 1956. This HDD weighed over a ton and stored an 'astonishing' (@ the time) 5 MB of data.

Do you appreciate being able to reach into your pocket & pull out your 8 GB memory stick now - or perhaps even your 3GS iPhone with 32 GB of memory?!? Something to think about, huh?

 

[AndyL]

Heh, Man that's a monster...

I've still got one of the old 7.25?" (not the 5" the BIG one) Floppies that I keep just to remind myself how good we have it... Also have a copy of windows 1.0 on 5.25's just for sh*ts and giggles.

Geeze those platters look like vinyl records Now to think - we can have aTB that fits in a 2.5" hdd nowadays...

 

[myakkagldwngr]

There is a man who I went to church with who, by a stroke of luck, took one of the first computer classes here in Fl. when the colleges offered it.
So fate had it that he then ended up with a job in the aerospace industry when we really did boldly go where no man had gone before.
He worked with the Apollo launches and has all the patches the ground crews were given to prove it.
He said the first computer they had over at NASA had magnetic disc 7 foot tall and held an astonishing 15K of memory.
The computer on the Apollo space craft had less memory than some wrist watches today.
It's amazing to think that except for speed, none can still compare to the human brain.
Well most of the human brains.

 

[Runningwolf]

Larry, that was pretty amazing. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Minnesotamaker]

You know what's even more amazing? They're probably still flying that aircraft with passengers on it.

 

[croppy]

i would have liked to be around to see all that progression. i have a 1 tb drive that fits in my pocket lol. i have also read that they are working on a petabyte (1000Tb) hard drive,

-dan-

 

[Woodbee]

When I first looked at the picture, I thought that it was the backside of "JohnT's hydraulic fruit press.

 

[mxsteve625]

I have done some work with NASA Langley and can assure you that we went to the moon with less computing (quite a bit less) than we have available today. It is absolutley amazing how we even got there on that technology.

 

[AndyL]

Nah - completely logical that we got there on that technology

Just think, there wasn't enough power to even show the BSOD (blue screen of death) - so microsoft wasn't able to be involved

(I kid I kid!)