An amazing story about a mass storage system from IBM.
The following photos were taken by Bob Resnikoff about 1982. The IBM 3850 Mass Storage System was the monster storage device of its day. Columbia's MSS had a capacity of 102.2 GB: 2000 cartridges of 50MB each; it was used to hold the entire 1980 USA Census database and make it available to users of Columbia's IBM mainframe computers.
The equivalent today would probably be a one petabyte system (1,000 terabytes), taken the advantages of computer power into account.
For some amazing pictures, read more
