This is the hard drive developed by IBM for their RAMAC computer in 1956. It has an amazing 5MB capacity, and consists of 50 1200RPM platters. In the last 50 years, hard drive capacity has increased exponentially to 150,000 times as much, while size has decreased to about the tenth of that first hard drive. If things keep progressing at the rate they have over the last 10 years, in another 10 years we'll have 2.5″ 75TB drives. That's enough to hold over a century of continuous music as higher than CD quality.

“Information is stored, magnetically, on fifty disks which rotate at 1200 rpm. These disks are mounted so as to rotate about a vertical axis, with a spacing of three tenths of an inch between disks. This spacing permits two magnetic heads to be positioned to any one of the 100 concentric tracks which are available on each side of each disk. Each track contains 500 alphanumeric characters. Total storage capacity: 5,000,000 characters. The two recording heads are mounted in a pair of arms which are moved, by a feed-back control system, in a radial direction to straddle a selected disk. This new system promises memory storage possibilities never before accomplished.”

Read more [Via: Digg]