File-Manager Storage Capacity Browser

1937 — Stibitz's binary relay. Bell Labs engineer George Stibitz builds the Model K (for Kitchen, where he soldered it on his kitchen table) - the first binary digital adder. Binary representation, where every state is 0 or 1, becomes the foundation of every storage system that follows. Stibitz's 1940 demo over telephone lines is the first remote computer access in history; the binary digit (later contracted to "bit" by John Tukey in 1947) is born here.

1951-1955 — Magnetic core memory. An MIT team led by Jay Forrester (Whirlwind project) develops magnetic-core memory: tiny iron-oxide rings woven onto wires, each holding a single bit by magnetic polarisation. A typical 1956 core plane held 4096 bits in roughly 30 cm². RAM was non-volatile, fast (microseconds), and reasonably reliable. Core dominated mainframe memory through the 1960s until DRAM's capacitor cells became cheaper.

1956 — The first disk drive. IBM ships the RAMAC 305, the world's first commercial hard-disk drive: fifty 24-inch platters storing 5 million 7-bit characters - about 3.75 MB total. Rented for $3,200/month ($35,000 in 2026 dollars), or roughly $10 per kB per year. The RAMAC seeded the magnetic-disk industry; its descendants reach 30 TB on a single 3.5" HDD today, an 8-million-fold density gain.

1964 — The 8-bit byte. IBM's System/360 mainframe family standardises the 8-bit byte. Previous machines used 6, 7, 9 or even 12-bit bytes; System/360's choice (driven by EBCDIC character encoding and packed BCD arithmetic) becomes the de-facto industry standard. Werner Buchholz had coined the term "byte" in 1956 working on IBM Stretch (intentionally misspelled to avoid "bit"). By the 1980s, 8-bit byte is universal everywhere except a few historical Soviet machines.

1968-1975 — The 1024 origin. Engineers working on early DRAM chips note that memory addressing is binary - 10 address lines = 1024 cells, 20 lines = 1,048,576. The shorthand "1K" is reused (sloppily) from SI's 1000 because the 2.4% error seemed negligible. Donald Knuth's 1968 Art of Computer Programming uses both kilo (1000) and KB (1024) interchangeably. Drive manufacturers stick with SI (which doubles their numbers' appearance), OSes drift to binary. The conflict will not be resolved for 30 years.

1998-2008 — IEC 80000-13. The International Electrotechnical Commission ratifies IEC 60027-2 in December 1998, formally introducing the prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, exbi, zebi, yobi (Ki/Mi/Gi/Ti/Pi/Ei/Zi/Yi). The 2008 revision IEC 80000-13 makes them the international quantity-unit standard. Linux ports filesystem and disk utilities (df, du, ls -h) to IEC over the next 5 years. Apple adopts SI labels in Mac OS X 10.6 (2009). Microsoft Windows still shows GiB labelled as "GB" in 2026 - a 28-year holdout.

2010-2026 — Cloud and AI scale. IDC's 2010 Digital Universe study estimates global stored data at 1.2 ZB. By 2025 the figure is 120+ ZB; 2030 forecasts hit 660 ZB. AWS S3 launches in 2006 with kilobytes per customer; in 2026 individual customers store exabytes. AI training corpora drive the curve: GPT-4 trained on ~10 TB of text; the upcoming GPT-7 and Gemini Ultra 5 lap the entire Common Crawl (~100 TB). DNA storage demonstrators in 2024 reach 215 PB/g - in principle the entire current internet fits in a teaspoon. The byte's 90-year journey from a kitchen-table relay to an exabyte cloud archive continues.