The Specs On This 1970 IBM Mainframe Will Remind You Just How Far Technology Has Come

IBM maintains an awesome archive of its history, collecting various documents and media it's released since being founded in 1911.

We were especially intrigued by this 1970 press release singing the praises of System/370 Model 145, a mainframe computer that was state of the art at the time of its inception. It had 500 KB of RAM, 233 megabytes of hard disk space, and ran at 2.5 MHz. It took up an entire room.

Nowadays, this computer would be able to store a small collection of photos and (slowly) access them. Not much else! You could double 32,000 characters of control storage to 64,000 by "using a portion of main memory, if needed, to accommodate optionally available functions."

Adjusted for inflation, this computer would cost you between $4.3 million and $10.8 million in today's dollars, depending on the options you selected.

Nowadays, the smartphone in every millenial's pocket is at least 1,000 times faster, and the most basic iPhone can store 80 times the data.