IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC computer on September 13th, 1956. It was the first computer to include a disk drive! The IBM 350 Disk File included a stack of fifty 24" discs and weighed in at just over a ton, requiring that it be moved around with forklifts and delivered via large cargo airplanes. The capacity of the disk file was 5 million 7-bit characters … or about 4.4 MB. The drive could have been increased to over 5MB but IBM marketers didn't think they could sell a product with that much storage!
Oh, the annual lease was $35,000 – there was no "buy" back then! Does anyone want check my calculation of what they'd charge to lease the 500GB drive I just bought for $89? Dollar for dollar and byte for byte, without regard to constant dollars, it'd be just a tad under $4 Billion!!
Still complaining about today's hardware costs?
gll
