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

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.

> 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.

> 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".

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.