Now that's what I call a hard drive

This unwieldy looking object being hauled into aeroplane is, believe it or not, a 5 MB hard disk, part of a 1956 IBM computer.  It weighed over a ton and could remember less than four floppy disks (which are now considered old fashioned), and this little memory stick (right) holds 4 GB - which is about 800 times more than the IBM monster.
800 times bigger

So some times technology does improve things.

Comments

[Richard Howard]

Yes , but forget this SINGLE piece of equipment's size Instead, reflect on the manufacturing, commissioning and operational economics of the DP and data collection, input via punched cards , much of it clerical drudgery.

Think on about the real estate and departmental overheads with their floor areas , air conditioning , and the power consumption to get the the Drive and its computer and tape storage systems moving.

Think further of the problems of writing programs in Cobol , Fortran and of dealing with the minutae of machine code and the unforgiving nature of the whole process of retreiving information etc etc only to get miles of continuous multipart stationary which had to be " Burst " and shipped around offices on trolleys and whose output content and format was rigid etc etc and which might well have to be analysed using paper and manual calculation.
and of the problems of interrogating the data to get meaningful / useful information.

Then you've also got the TIME and costs and economics involved with the whole process and the data collection and input clerks. ETC ETC

Thank God I was only on the edge of that stuff for a few years in the later 1960's. Then I got a LIFE

BYEE