Do you know what this is?

[Khai]

it's a hard drive.....

[Frederik]

A "Black box" or an Autopilot...???

[Roger]

The first IBM laptop.

[Alan Fraser]

I think I've seen this before. I believe it's one of the first 'electronic brains' with somewhat less computing power than my wristwatch and a price tag about the same as a small country.

[pilou]

It's writen "IBM" up corner right side

[solo]

Looks like the first stick of Ram, that one was a wopping 1k.

[TIG]

As Pilou says it's an IBM computer.

To be precise it's an IBM 305 RAMAC.

That central cylinder is a hard drive. IBM introduced the hard drive (RAMAC) in 1956; it stored 5Mb [that's Mb NOT Gb !!!] in an enclosure the size of a big refrigerator, and cost ~$150,000. 1Tb now costs ~£300 !!! So we now have ~10,485,760 more space per dollar after 50+ years of development: it also fits in a much smaller volume...

This is an interesting link - please look through all 4 pages - I particularly like the Apple I on page 3 - design icon of its time... http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/History.htm ...aaah the good old days...............

[Gaieus]

I remember my firt PC had a 40Mb hard drive and it had a processor with 10 MHz speed and in "turbo mode" (only for certain programs) 20 MHz. My first video card had 1Mb memory.
These are all MEGAbytes and Hertz(es?)

Windows was nowhere at that time.

And yes, I know,even more previously there were all those other, smaller computer that you used tape cassettes to store info on...

[solo]

[Alan Fraser]

I just bought one of the new U3 memory sticks with 160 times the entire storage capacity of my first real PC. Amazing when you think about it.
Mind you, that old machine itself is pretty amazing when you consider that little more than a decade before the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park were using Colossus machines that had thousands of the old glass radio valves as logic gates and no onboard memory at all.