Image of the Day: Behemoth Hard Disk Drives of the Past

Take a look at how far technology has come.

In 1956 the 305 RAMAC contained an enormous HDD. (Image via Retronaut)
 
In September, 1956, IBM released the 305 RAMAC, the world’s first “super” computer with a hard-disk drive(HDD). The 5-Mbyte HDD in the electronic data processing machine weighed over a ton.

Read IBM’s press release from the day of release.

(Image via The Future Journalism Project)

In 2005, the microSD card was introduced. The microSD card is a removable flash memory card used for storing information. These cards are commonly used in our everyday devices such as cellphones, videogames, and GPS systems.

The 16-Gbyte microSD card pictured above holds about 64 times the data as the 250-Mbyte hard drive from 1979, weighs less than a gram, and can be inexpensively purchased for about $11. Quite a difference 50 years have made on data storage.