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Walt Mankowski is a recovering ivory tower computer scientist who recently completed a postdoc working with biologists to process and visualize terabytes of 2D and 3D time lapse microscope images. In his past life he spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer at a major cable home shopping network. He enjoys Perl, regular expressions, high-performance computing, and Futurama.
Authored Comments
Right. I have a picture in my talk of workers in 1956 moving a 5 MB hard drive that's the size of several refrigerators. But then, the first PC hard drive I ever used only had 3 MB of storage, and it seemed enormous!
IBM released their first hard drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC, in 1956. That was a few years before COBOL, which dates to 1959. Hard drive storage was extremely expensive, which is probably why they were still uncommon.