Happy birthday, hard drive

Yea, the hard drive turns 50 soon. Here is a short clipping from an article on *gag* MSNBC. Pretty amazing stuff.

The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue's San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."
And if that were not amusing enough. You can check in with the guys at Micro$oft and see yet another demonstration gone wrong.
But my favorite was on Conan a while back when Bill himself got to demo crappy software. I love when he says, "we must have the wrong remote. Good thing we only have one". (??) Good save, Bill.