Completely Useless Information

haveibeendone

I came across a site (http://ns1758.ca/winch/winchest.html) that said an IBM 5 Mb hard disk drive cost $50,000 in 1956. At $10,000/Mb this got me wondering about the 640 Gb HDD in my Dell.

In 1956 a 640Gb HDD would have cost approx $10,000 per Mb = $10 million dollars per Gb = $6.4 Billion for 640 Gb. Hope the sums are right.

Allowing for inflation between 1956 and now (This Is Money) @19.6 fold this gives approx $125 Billion for the drive.

The site rates my 640 Gb at $50 at todays prices.

ddoris

Yes , that's pretty useless but I would have thought that the cost of things has gone up by more than 19.6 times since 1956?

tronator

ddoris wrote: »

Yes , that's pretty useless but I would have thought that the cost of things has gone up by more than 19.6 times since 1956?

Can't be right. If you take an average inflation of 3% then it is ~ 5 times. He used an inflation of almost 6 for his calculations.

JonnyThunder

$50,000 for 5Gb is a bargain. Where can I get one?

iamcornholio

The cost is nothing, the main issue is that it will be the size of your house and all the lights in the neighbourhood will dim when it spins up

kwikbreaks

There were no PCs in 1956. That is an early mainframe disk and would like as not be at least filing cabinet size.

When I started in IT (or DP as it was called in those days) in 1970 the low end IBM mainframe disks were 2311s and only had ~ 7MB capacity. The actual disk bit was removable and something over a foot across. It sat in a cabinet about waist height and 2 to 3 feet across.

Richie-from-the-Boro

haveibeendone wrote: »

I came across a site (http://ns1758.ca/winch/winchest.html) that said an IBM 5 Mb hard disk drive cost $50,000 in 1956. At $10,000/Mb this got me wondering about the 640 Gb HDD in my Dell.

In 1956 a 640Gb HDD would have cost approx $10,000 per Mb = $10 million dollars per Gb = $6.4 Billion for 640 Gb. Hope the sums are right.

Allowing for inflation between 1956 and now (This Is Money) @19.6 fold this gives approx $125 Billion for the drive.

The site rates my 640 Gb at $50 at todays prices.

- are these drives only SCSi / IDE / or are they SATA and .. .. will they work with Audiophile SATA cables ?

S0litaire

This takes me back to secondary school...
Our Computer room got in a "massive" 250Mb hard disk drive unit for our network of 20 BBC Model B Micros...
Massive being the operative word! it was a box just over 2 foot wide, a foot deep and 10 inches high!
Network storage! no more floppy disks! Woo!!! lol

John_Gray

kwikbreaks wrote: »

There were no PCs in 1956. That is an early mainframe disk and would like as not be at least filing cabinet size.

When I started in IT (or DP as it was called in those days) in 1970 the low end IBM mainframe disks were 2311s and only had ~ 7MB capacity. The actual disk bit was removable and something over a foot across. It sat in a cabinet about waist height and 2 to 3 feet across.

Did your night shift operators ever use these for curling, on the shiny computer room floor? Someone 'accidentally', and highly suspiciously, broke the bottom of a tape drive with one of the very heavy 3336 disk packs... (lots of nostalgia here...)

kwikbreaks

I was an operator at the time.

We didn't use them for curling but they were pretty robust - there were odd points in the schedule when we needed to swap packs and as we got to go home when the schedule was completed (only 2 shifts) we used to stop the disks quicker by lifting the lid and sticking our palms on the top platter :eek:

I remember a bit later after I'd moved to a different company seeing a sandwich circling in a 2319 (iirc) tray which another operator had somehow dropped in. Naturally food and drink were always banned from the machine room but standards tended to slip (a lot) on night shift.

Once I moved on from operating IT became boring...

nottseagull

kwikbreaks wrote: »

When I started in IT (or DP as it was called in those days) in 1970 the low end IBM mainframe disks were 2311s and only had ~ 7MB capacity. The actual disk bit was removable and something over a foot across. It sat in a cabinet about waist height and 2 to 3 feet across.

And now you can fit 16448 of those MB onto a micro SD card smaller than my little finger nail. Where will it end?