.

Here’s a quick timeline of hard drives, starting in 1956, going all the way up to the present.

“1956: IBM ships the first hard drive in
the RAMAC 305 system. The drive holds 5MB of data at $10,000 a
megabyte. The system is as big as two refrigerators and uses 50 24-inch
platters.”

“1979: IBM’s 3370 uses seven 14-inch platters to store 571MB, the first drive to use thin-film heads.”

In the 26 years between the two above advances, data storage changed drastically.  If you took the equivalent storage area from 1956, and used 1979 data density, you’d find that what would store 5mb in 1956 (by area)  could store a whopping 11,985mb in 1979. 

Even the number from 1056 are amazing.  5 mb, on 50 24-inch platters.  I could hold that much now on two floppy discs.  Who even uses those anymore?  On my 2gig USB key, 5 mb would be .25% of the entire thing.  That’s smaller than the head of a pin.  It sure is amazing how far we’ve come, isn’t it?

Read (and view photos of more) here
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,127105/printable.html