A whole five megabytes, and I’ve been inside bathrooms that weren’t much larger than that thing. There’s no mention of price, but I’m betting it’s in the six- or seven-figure range. (I didn’t click through to find out; the details of computer artifacts from before I was born just aren’t that interesting to me.)
8 bit home computers couldn’t get more storage than that decades later.
Exactly thirty years after that, I started working for a guy who ran his own one-man software company, and had an external Winchester drive. I believe it was also 5MB (though it might have been 20MB, my memory is uncertain), but it was just a little box sitting on his desk.
You are a wee bit high on the cost estimate. According to wikipedia the price was $56,000 to purchase or about $1,100 a month to lease.
I remember the newer versions of those drives from one of my first computer related jobs in a main frame computer room. The read/write head assembly was so heavy the drives had to be bolted to the for or the inertia created by moving the heads would cause it to wander all over the place. They were also quite noisy.
Wow, is that all? Take two, they’re small. 😉
And yes, I’ve heard about the “walking” hard drives. Amusing, but I’ll bet it was less amusing to witness first-hand.