HolyCoast: Mystery Photo of the Day
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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Mystery Photo of the Day

What do you suppose this is?
This photo was taken in 1956 and is a 5MB hard drive weighing over a ton for the IBM 305 RAMAC"super computer". Many of you probably have portable thumb drives that hold 5GB or more, something that would have been unthinkable back then.  The photos taken by my current digital camera are 4.3 MB...apiece.

And how about this old ad:

Wow, 10MB for the price of a small car.  This add came out sometime prior to 1982 because the business is located in San Diego but the phone number was still in the 714 area code.  At one time 714 covered all of Orange County, San Diego County, and parts inland.  Today there are a bunch of area codes, another sign of expanding technology.

The first personal computer I worked on was purchased by the bank I worked for around 1985 and was an IBM 8088 PC with dual floppy disks and no hard drive.  One large disk contained the software program and the other your data.  It had one of those monochrome green screens and we thought it was pretty cool.  When we upgraded it to an XT with an internal hard drive we thought we'd really hit the big time.

3 comments:

Mary said...

Ha! Funny memories. I remember the first PC our company bought (and we only bought ONE to start with, because it cost $5000) only had a single floppy drive. Had to remove the program disk to be able to save your work on a floppy. We thought we were really moving up in the "tech world" when we got a PC with DUAL floppies. Oh.. those were the days! That first PC must have been around 1982/83... My, how times have changed...

Larry Sheldon said...

I wasn't surprised that I recognized the RAMAC, but I was startled to recognize instantly who PAA was.

Larry Sheldon said...

When I bought our first XT clone (put together by an Arab in a shop at the Hillsdale Mall) people said I was insane for only getting one floppy and a 10MB disc--Never in a million years would I find a use for that space, they said.

This laptop has 1 GB of RAM.