Adam Savage gives us a guided tour of how far along computing has come in 60 or so years:
You’ve come a long way, baby! It’s interesting to note that the massive 1GB HD they have is from 1981 back when I was cutting my teeth on a Commodore 64 with a 177K 1541 floppy drive.
I can’t get my head around that so obviously what it has grown to is overwhelming now1
I wonder if the huge array necessary for 1TB in vacuum tubes could even be as small as they said. I think they were thinking only of volume. When you account for heat, I wouldn’t be surprised if that would melt the crust or turn the air to plasma.
Back in my student days, we had a 2000 amplifier analog computer (5 valves per amplifier). One of my tasks was to turn it on each monday morning (it stayed on until friday afternoon). On average 3 valves blew at each turn-on. I had to find and replace the duds in the hour it took for the room-sized rack to achieve thermal equilibrium 😉