4 ms·

What 5 Megabytes of Data Looked Like in 1966 (62,500 punched cards)

18 points by dxs 2y ago

randall 2y ago
[flagged]
- nelblu 2y ago
  archived it for anyone else who might be seeing ads : https://archive.is/MSGaS https://archive.is/MSGaS
- SirFatty 2y ago
  vintag.es takes content from other sites and reposts it, and have been doing it for years probably making a fair amount of money doing that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tombert 2y ago
By the time I was actually aware of what computers were and how they more or less worked, five megs wasn’t a ton of storage to me, but even then the increasing quantity of data being stored and the decreasing size of the storage media has never ceased to amaze me. When I was 12, I bought my first hard drive for my computer. It was a fair amount of money, relatively slow (IDE) and was only 60 gigs IIRC. I don’t remember the price but everything is expensive when you’re 12; it was probably on the order of about $100. When I was 15, I got my first MicroSD card, it was four gigabytes, and I was completely astounded by it. Something the size of my fingernail could store a thousand PERFECTLY LEGALLY OBTAINED MP3s, and it wasn’t even that expensive, even at the time. Fast forward to 2023, and I buy a 512gb MicroSD card for about the same price (not adjusted for inflation). It’s insane. It doesn’t feel like it should be possible. Humans can be cool sometimes.
- randall 2y ago
  careful, we’re entering the stage of life where nostalgia becomes a cliche.
  - tombert 2y ago
    That's fair, though I feel like these kinds of posts invite such comparisons.
jmclnx 2y ago
Wow, what a pic. But by 1966 hard drives were available. I do not remember the max size but I think you could get a 5meg drive by then.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  1956. 5 million 6 bit bytes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_350 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...
- micah94 2y ago
  Looks like they would have cost hundreds of thousands (or you could lease for a few grand a month). Back in the 60s... Might as well have been a billion zillion dollars.
the_third_wave 2y ago
> Each card was a physical medium that contained a limited amount of data, typically a few hundred bytes Standard IBM punch cards were 80 columns by 12 rows so they could theoretically hold 960 bits. In practice they contained up to 80 characters EBCDIC, an 8-bit encoding so around 80 "bytes".
palmotea 2y ago
> It could take up to four days to load just 5 MB of data, an operation that would now be completed in milliseconds using modern storage devices like flash drives or cloud computing. I don't think that's really an apples to apples comparison. I'd bet the "business value" represented by that pile of punch cards was probably much higher than a typical 5 MB chunk of data today. There was undoubtedly a lot of thought put into packing as much meaning onto a card as possible and only collecting what was needed. Even accounting for that, things are much faster today, but it's worth considering.

18 points by dxs 2y ago

randall 2y ago

[flagged]

nelblu 2y ago
archived it for anyone else who might be seeing ads : https://archive.is/MSGaS https://archive.is/MSGaS
SirFatty 2y ago
vintag.es takes content from other sites and reposts it, and have been doing it for years probably making a fair amount of money doing that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tombert 2y ago

By the time I was actually aware of what computers were and how they more or less worked, five megs wasn’t a ton of storage to me, but even then the increasing quantity of data being stored and the decreasing size of the storage media has never ceased to amaze me. When I was 12, I bought my first hard drive for my computer. It was a fair amount of money, relatively slow (IDE) and was only 60 gigs IIRC. I don’t remember the price but everything is expensive when you’re 12; it was probably on the order of about $100. When I was 15, I got my first MicroSD card, it was four gigabytes, and I was completely astounded by it. Something the size of my fingernail could store a thousand PERFECTLY LEGALLY OBTAINED MP3s, and it wasn’t even that expensive, even at the time. Fast forward to 2023, and I buy a 512gb MicroSD card for about the same price (not adjusted for inflation). It’s insane. It doesn’t feel like it should be possible. Humans can be cool sometimes.

randall 2y ago
careful, we’re entering the stage of life where nostalgia becomes a cliche.
- tombert 2y ago
  That's fair, though I feel like these kinds of posts invite such comparisons.

jmclnx 2y ago

Wow, what a pic. But by 1966 hard drives were available. I do not remember the max size but I think you could get a 5meg drive by then.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
1956. 5 million 6 bit bytes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_350 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...
micah94 2y ago
Looks like they would have cost hundreds of thousands (or you could lease for a few grand a month). Back in the 60s... Might as well have been a billion zillion dollars.

the_third_wave 2y ago

> Each card was a physical medium that contained a limited amount of data, typically a few hundred bytes Standard IBM punch cards were 80 columns by 12 rows so they could theoretically hold 960 bits. In practice they contained up to 80 characters EBCDIC, an 8-bit encoding so around 80 "bytes".

palmotea 2y ago

> It could take up to four days to load just 5 MB of data, an operation that would now be completed in milliseconds using modern storage devices like flash drives or cloud computing. I don't think that's really an apples to apples comparison. I'd bet the "business value" represented by that pile of punch cards was probably much higher than a typical 5 MB chunk of data today. There was undoubtedly a lot of thought put into packing as much meaning onto a card as possible and only collecting what was needed. Even accounting for that, things are much faster today, but it's worth considering.