In a similar sense, this is one of my favorite historical photos. A nuclear reactor delivered by steam locomotive!
Yes kids, before color TV was commonplace people would stand around and watch cargo get loaded for fun. It was a dark time in entertainment history.
I was in Turkiye a couple years ago and there was a crowd watching a construction site. Then again, watching big machines work actually is fascinating.
Hey if someone told me I could go see the 2025 equivalent of this hard drive being unloaded if probably go take a look.
Someone please photoshop (or gimp) hundreds of people crowded around these fingers.
What would that even be?
Server rack with a couple of PBs worth of drives in it would probably match the physical size. Or a massive tape archive storage.
This honestly just makes me wonder how chill a workday was if three whole buildings of office drones could empty into the streets to watch them load this for two hours.
My brother in christ, you have no idea. The rise of the computer age and needing round the clock support for all that entails has really done a number on the working class. I am old enough to remember how chill work environments in the 80's and early 90's were. (Everyone smoking indoors sucked, though)
I considered editing my comment to reference the rampant secondhand smoke.
But yeah I just interviewed for a position with an on-call rotation. I asked them about sleeping hours, and then I asked them about attendance expectations in the face of a midnight emergency. They just blinked at me.
Good luck to you man. I went through that for a long time but those days are behind me now.
This was definitely true in the 80s where I grew up
But of trivia about the first IBM hard drive: the heads weighed about 8g each and were glued to the actuator arms. The platters needed periodic cleaning, but the cleaning agent dissolved the glue holding the heads. The heads would break free from the arms and adhere to the platter. The rotation speed would accelerate the head outward, and the head would exit the housing with the approximate kinetic energy of a 9mm bullet.
What would have happened if we just dropped a 20tb hard drive in front of the computer researchers of that time?
World war? Aliens? Or just trashed due to how advanced the tech in it would be to them? Yeah, I think the last.
What would have happened if we just dropped a 20tb hard drive in front of the computer researchers of that time?
Nothing, they would have no idea what it was, or how to interface with it. They might even end up destroying it because they have no idea of the power requirements. Even if they managed to get it powered up and guessed at what it was for, they would still be stuck with the issue of not having an operating system which is capable of logically addressing all of the storage. And the lack of drivers would make that even harder.
A lot of modern technology sits atop a mountain of other modern technology which must be sorted out before you can even start to think about designing the end product. It could be that, since they knew what was possible, and had an example to crib off of, scientists and engineers could have gotten to that point faster. But, there is just an insane amount of prior tech in front of modern computers that any one piece of it, thrown back that far, would likely just be shiny junk.
One of my favorite things about what you are saying is modern transistor gates are smaller than microscope resolution at the time. Even if they could recognize an integrated circuit it would be another 10-20 years before they could even start to reverse engineer it.
Yeah that or aliens.
The power requirements are printed right on the label tho…also they had x-rays back then too.
Printed circuit boards were becoming "commonplace" (according to Wikipedia) and the transistor had been invented about 9 years before, so they'd probably be able to figure out at least conceptually what they were looking at. In other words, it's not as if it would seem like a magical rock etched with runes or something, like it would if you showed it to somebody from 1556.
Therefore, I think they'd get out a microscope and oscilloscope and start trying to reverse-engineer it. Probably speed up the development of computer technology quite a bit, by giving them clues on what direction to go.
Therefore, I think they'd get out a microscope and oscilloscope and start trying to reverse-engineer it. Probably speed up the development of computer technology quite a bit, by giving them clues on what direction to go.
Knowing what something is doesn't necessarily teach people how it was made. No matter how much you examine a sheet of printed paper, someone with no conception of a laser printer would not be able to derive that much information about how something could have produced such precise, sharp text on a page. They'd be stuck thinking about movable metal type dipped in ink, not lasers burning powdered toner onto a page.
If you took a modern finFET chip from, say, the TSMC 5nm process nodes, and gave it to electrical engineers of 1995, they'd be really impressed with the physical three dimensional structure of the transistors. They could probably envision how computers make it possible to design those chips. But they'd had no conception of how to make EUV at wavelengths necessary to make the photolithography possible at those sizes. No amount of the examination of the chip itself will reveal the secrets of how it was made: very bright lasers pointed at an impossibly precise stream of liquid tin droplets against highly polished mirrors that focus that EUV radiation against the silicon and masks that make the 2-dimensional planar pattern, then advanced techniques for lining up 2-dimensional features into a three dimensional stack.
It's kinda like how we don't actually know how Roman concrete or Damascus steel was made. We can actually make better concrete and steel today, but we haven't been able to reverse engineer how they made those materials in ancient times.
You would be burned as a witch.
I way more than a duck though
Do you weigh more than a duck with an anvil?
From that, to 1 TB on a microSD the size of a fingernail. Impressive!
It's doubled, we have 2 TB cards now
If random source is to be trusted, it cost $34,500 in 1957. You could lease it for $3,200/month. The 2TB card is $180 in 2025.
Adjusted for 2025:
2TB MicroSD: $180
5MB HDD: $398,852.50 or $36,995.01/month
Adjusted for 1957:
2TB MicroSD: $15.70
5MB HDD: $34,500 or $3,200/month
Imagine what a HDD of that size could store today.
At least one call of duty game, sick!
What could it?
Minimum 10 MB I'd say.
This guy knows computers.
No, just hard drives.
no fucking way
That's a bold assumption.
Estimate the volume of that box then calculate how many data centre grade HDDs would fit inside to get a rough idea
About 10 'AAA' game titles, I'd say.
At least 1 node_modules
Look at that back form, my gosh.
As you can see from the sign, hard drive parking had not yet been invented.
The start up sound must've been legendary
That thing probably made worse grinding noises than The Mangler
And now I have a phone capable of taking photos too large to be stored on that drive. Crazy how quickly technology can progress.
Crazy how quickly technology can progress.
70 years is a long loooooooooooooooooong time for "technology"
It is nowadays, and it is in RF and digital electronics, but that's far from universal.
Back then, the prefix 'mega' still meant something.
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