“This is a storage room that held the early tapes for the computers. In those days it was very bulky, but it was the beginning.” LS
I contacted Dag Spicer, the Senior Curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for a little more information about the photo and he dated the image in the early to mid 1960’s. He said the reels typically held up to 150 MB of information per reel.
After a rough count of 226 tapes in the photograph, giving them the maximum of 150 MB capacity per tape it works out to 33.1 Gigabytes of storage in the room. A cheap thumb drive can handle that today.
Anyone out there have any idea where in Jacksonville this might have been?
Tags: computer, data, storage, tapes
I went to work at the Prudential in 1966. It looks like what they had there in the late 60’s. There was a whole floor dedicated to “the computer”. We typed data onto punch cards and carried them down for input. It seemed very futuristic at the time!
I find it amazing how little storage all those tapes provided when compared to today’s standards. Of course 50 years from now when we look back folks will be laughing about what we thought was cutting edge.
I think these “computers things” are going to catch on someday.
in the 60s and 70s i worked for a large paper/chemical co. I was the tape librarian with an inventory of over 3000 reels however it was not in jacksonville.