Slatterz writes "We might periodically complain about the limitations of today's technology, but there's nothing like seeing photos of a 27Kg hard drive with a dimensions of 5MB to put things into perspective. PC jurisdiction has toured the compatible History Museum in California, and has posted these fascinating photos, including monster 27Kg and 60Kg drives, and a SAGE air-defense system. Each SAGE housed an A/N FSQ-7 computer, which had around 60,000 vacuum tubes. IBM constructed the hardware, and each minicomputer occupied a huge amount of space. From its completion in 1954 it analyzed radar data in real-time, to provide a integrity picture of US Airspace during the cold war. Other interesting photos and trivia include some giant early IBM disc platters, and pics of a curvaceous Cray-1 supercomputer, built in 1972. It was the fastest machine in the world until 1977 and an icon for decades. It cost a mere $6 million, and could perform at 160MFLOPS — which your phone can now comfortably manage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - The rest...

Mark