Tactical Advice

An Old 5MB Hard Drive Filled Up an Entire Room — Quick Take

Hard drives of the past held far less data, but came in much bigger packages.
5MB Hard Drive Once Filled Up a Room — Quick Take

If you think your desktop computer takes up too much space, consider yourself lucky that you weren’t in the computer business back in 1956. A 5-megabyte hard drive required a forklift just to move it around back then, as seen in this photo from The Next Web of an IBM 305 RAMAC.

Dubbed a ‘supercomputer’ back in the day, the 5MB hard drive weighed more than a ton. Compare that with a 1.5-terabyte external drive that weighs less than 3 pounds today. We’ve come a long way, baby.

old 5mb hard drive from 1956

For more fun with retro technology, read our article “10 Old-School Technologies Fondly Remembered.”

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