I was in an IBM shop at Mattel Toys that had a wall of IBM 3330s and an IBM 370/155 mainframe

In the 60's I worked for a computer company in the UK. I worked on "conventional" computers – 12' x 6' cabinets, many thousands of transistors, 48KW core RAM, and large 9 track tape drives. In the next bay over was an experimental "solid state" version, a cube about 18" on a side. The standing joke was that some day the computer would fit inside the plug we used to connect it to the tape drives. So, half right – we didn't consider that the storage technology would also shrink.

I am playing around with a powerful Linux system at home these days. 600 MHz ARM, 256MB RAM, 256MB Flash, Bluetooth, 802.11g, micro-SD card slot, camera interface, touch-screen LCD interface, USB master hub, USB slave/master "on the go" hub, USB serial port (boot console). It is the size of a stick of gum. I kid you not.

In the 60′s I worked for a computer company in the UK. I worked on “conventional” computers – 12′ x 6′ cabinets, many thousands of transistors, 48KW core RAM, and large 9 track tape drives. In the next bay over was an experimental “solid state” version, a cube about 18″ on a side. The standing joke was that some day the computer would fit inside the plug we used to connect it to the tape drives. So, half right – we didn’t consider that the storage technology would also shrink.

I am playing around with a powerful Linux system at home these days. 600 MHz ARM, 256MB RAM, 256MB Flash, Bluetooth, 802.11g, micro-SD card slot, camera interface, touch-screen LCD interface, USB master hub, USB slave/master “on the go” hub, USB serial port (boot console). It is the size of a stick of gum. I kid you not.

The drive unit on is an IBM 3380, which first shipped in the early '80s and was about 2.5Gb when first shipped. Note it has two head assemblies on the same set of platters. There's a better picture at

http://www.tietokonemuseo.saunalahti.fi/eng/ibm_3…

and IBM has pictures showing how much datacenter space those units took up (2 per cabinet), plus the history of it, at

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storag…

in which you see that unit, in September 1987, had just shy of 4GB (though there was a "cheap model" available with reduced storage, around 1.25 GB)

And I can remember when a platter the same size as the one on the left held 5MB.