Hard drives are the big 5-0!

From a Seagate promotional email:

Middle-Aged Marvel: 50 Years Later, Hard Drives Keep Getting Better
A very important anniversary was celebrated recently: On September 13, 1956, IBM began shipping the first magnetic hard disk drive, called RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). It was about the size of two phone booths and stored five megabytes—enough capacity to hold one Chuck Berry song—not that anyone in 1956 knew how to digitize “Roll Over Beethoven,” a hit record for Berry that year.

Adjusted for 2006 dollars, RAMAC cost $350,000, or $70,000 per megabyte. Today, a 60-GB, 1.8-inch Seagate hard drive can store some 30,000 digital tunes and the cost per megabyte is very low.

Don’t forget to sing “Happy Birthday, Hard Drive” this week.