Staggering Progress in Technology - The Hard Disk

In 1956 IBM released the first commercial hard drive, the massive IBM 305 RAMAC which weighed over a ton and cost $160,000. It had fifty 24-inch disks (cost per megabyte being $11,364):

By the early 80's you could buy this beauty of a hard disk for a mere $3,398, storing a whopping 10MB (cost per megabyte being $340):

Today you can buy this very unremarkable 36GB hard drive, considered tiny by today's standards, for $4.99 (cost per MB $1.66):

Or even this little fingernail sized 8GB micro SD card for $0.99 (cost per MB $0.000120849609375)

Here's a nice side-by-side comparison of the progress we've made since 1979:

And here's what a gigabyte looks like 20 years ago versus today: