Computers now can hold about one million times the data they used to.

A friend of mine is mourning the bankruptcy of Radio Shack, having grown up building computers and electronic thingies, and he still has a bunch of those old engineer's notebooks and schematics Radio Shack once sold. So he was reading over some computer history and pointed me to a Wired article about the hard drive. Here's some of what he said and what I looked up on another site (yes, I tend to take notes when he talks about this stuff, because I consider him a bit of computer history himself.):

IBM made the first computer with a hard drive, in 1956. The RAMAC computer filled a room, as many did back then. Its hard drive looked like a giant version of an air conditioner unit, the circular kind that sits outside the house. This drive could hold about 3.75-5 MB of data, the equivalent of one MP3 file — one song on iTunes. (But this was enormous then, and today’s song files are actually very complex.) The drive weighed about 1,000 pounds and cost $300,000 (in today’s dollars).

Today’s Mac hard drives can hold a terabyte or more of data. That means the storage capacity of computers has increased a millionfold, in 59 years.


According to computerhope.com:

a megabyte is about 873 pages of text, or 4 books;
a terabyte is about 916,259,689 pages of text, or over 4.5 million books.