Data Storage, 50 Years Later

It's interesting to watch the progression of technology as it relates to the size of gadgets. The ubiquitous cliché that electronics shrink in physical size while exploding in capacity and performance has been with us since the transistor radio of the 1960's, but nowhere else is this better exemplified than what's going on in the storage device market.

I'm in the market to upgrade the storage in my PDA phone to allow me to carry hundreds of songs, pictures and even movies....on my phone. No, I don't need to carry movies or music on my phone, it's just a hobby of mine. Anyway, while googling "miniSD cards", the kind my phone takes, I discovered a new kind of storage card out there -- the "microSD", which is even smaller than the tiny miniSD cards that have been on the market for a while now. I understand that SanDisk has recently created, unbelievably, an 8GB microSD card. To put this in perspective, I wanted to reach back to the earliest example I could find of a commercially viable storage device. Turns out IBM was the first to produce and market such a machine fifty years ago, called the 305 RAMAC. The 305 RAMAC had a storage capacity of 5MB (megabytes, not gigabytes), was the size of a 5' tall, 6' wide cabinet, and weighted over a ton. Literally, a ton. That's around 2,200 lbs. Try getting that in the overhead on a plane.

Let's take a closer look.

The IBM 305 RAMAC hard drive:


The SanDisk 8GB microSD card:


.....that picture really doesn't do the microSD card justice. I couldn't find a pictue of someone holding the new 8GB card, but the physical dimensions are exactly the same as this state-of-the-art (for its time) 128MB microSD card from a few years ago:



50 years of progress. It's staggering. Where will we be in 50 more years? In 15? Is progress only measured in how small our electronics are? Or what functions they can perform? It's both, really. That IBM 5MB 1 ton hard drive would never be able to play an mp3 file of a 4MB Buddy Holly song recorded at about the same time, even if you could hypothetically connect it to a modern media player like iTunes or Windows Media Player. The explosion of technology isn't happening in a linear fashion, it's exponential. The speed of progress is accelerating at unbelievable speeds, the amount of data being created, exchanged, and stored is likewise growing exponentially, and market demand is fuelling this acceleration. The takeaway is this: fifty or even fifteen years from now we can't imagine how our lives will be changed by this technological evolution, or revolution depending on how you look at it.

When IBM shipped it's first 305 RAMAC it could have pushed storage to 10MB, but they chose not to. The marketing department felt they would be unable to sell a machine with such a massive amount of storage -- how could anyone ever use more than 5MB?

Food for thought.

PS
Found this gem from the late 1960's about a few of the conveniences a 'home computer' might bring to the average American family. The hardware of the time may have been antiquated compared to today's standards, but this is clear evidence that some very visionary minds were strikingly accurate. Imagine that, in the late 60's, someone had talked about shopping 'from home', or exchanging 'electronic correspondence with anyone around the world, instantly'. You'd surely raise some skeptical eyebrows. Wonder what the far-out thinkers are saying today about the world of 2047...