A 5MB Hard Drive, 1956

The hard drive IBM shipped in 1956:

Stored five megabytes
Cost $11,000 per megabyte
Was 60 inches long x 68 inches high x 29 inches deep
Weighed about one ton

about $121,819.66 per mb in today's money.

And nowadays you can get a 2TB SSD that fits in your pocket and costs like $150.
Can someone do the math on how much cheaper and smaller memory is now?
- It's a veritable fuckton cheaper. In scientific terms at least.
- Hell, you can get a 1tb microSD card for around that same price. Crazy. Be careful not to accidentally inhale it, lol
- It's 0,000075 USD per mb now with your example, which is about 146 666 666 times cheaper.

Pics like this remind me of the Elliott 405 vs Raspberry Pi Zero tweet:

"Think, Bob - in 70 or so years, maybe we'll have cut this down to HALF the size!"

Or, ‘there will be warehouses full of these one day; just think, a whole One —Hundred—Megabyte!’ Mind blown
I wonder if that concept would have even been present yet. In 1956 they had never seen a technology cycle like doubling of capacities or capabilities like this. Computers were just things that took up entire rooms. Everybody thought the technology was only interesting for massive enterprise or universities.
I don't think they even had 8-track at this point? Perhaps some cars had record players, so they had indeed seen some technology go from living room size to car size.

I really think it is amazing that now we can put exponentially more data than this in a pocket. And that most humans now carry pocket computers that can access astounding amounts of information.

The information age really is amazing.

And yet somehow there are still flat earthers and the like carrying around tons of data that proves them wrong but they just don't care.
I wonder how big a space we'd need to accommodate for just 100 gigs, using the footprint of this 5MB drive?
- 20 thousand of them.

The first two hardrives I had experience were not that big, but still required to people to get into the cabinet. A Fujitsu Eagle and a CDC I can't remember which model that had 5MB fixed and 5MB removable.