Expensive, heavy and bulky: This was the first hard drive developed by IBM with a capacity of 5 MB

The storage devices They have been the most advanced in technological records. The internal capacities increase in grotesque amounts and the size of the devices is reduced to dimensions that we qualify as tiny.

So much so that the first hard drive in history, manufactured by IBM, shows you images that today seem incredible. It is very likely that they are reading this news on a cell phone that fits in the palm of any of their hands.

At most, they do it on a tablet that registers larger dimensions or on a desktop or laptop PC.

In either case, we are talking about small devices with that first hard drive and in terms of Gigabytes or Terabytes. The old IBM device, manufactured in 1956, could only store Megabytes and it wasn’t that it extended very much either.

as he remembers 3D Games in one review, IBM’s hard drive, called the IBM 350 RAMAC, could only store an amount of data not to exceed 5 MB. We’re talking about the 1950s, when typing still ruled offices. So, in matters of text it was really a beastly machine.

The IBM 350 hard drive could hold about five million characters of accounting data. That is approximately 2.5 million pages of typed text, recalls the aforementioned medium.

IBM and its cumbersome and heavy hard drive

The concrete measures of this apparatus They far exceeded the current micro SD. They had an extension of 1.52 meters long and 1.73 high, which expanded with its 74 centimeters in width. Loading it was not easy, since it had about 907 kilos, due to all its factory components.

Could anyone buy it? The reality is that no. Companies paid a kind of monthly subscription to use it, which required a payment of $3,200 every 30 days.

Obviously it was not worth it and in just five years they discontinued it. But it was the pioneer, who gave the first stitch towards what today is so small that we can lose it.