Henry Blodget writes:

This is a picture of an IBM hard drive being loaded onto an airplane in 1956. According to @HistoricalPics, which tweeted the picture, it's a 5 mega-byte drive, and it weighed more than 2,000 pounds.

To put that in context, 55 years later, the weakest iPhone 5S has a 16 gigabyte drive, about 3,200-times as big. It weighs a quarter of a pound.

The IBM hard drive could have stored exactly one iPhone picture.

Robert Mann suggests that the drive in the picture is an IBM 350, which was announced in 1956 and, per Wikipedia, actually only had 3.75 megabytes of storage. Also per Wikipedia, the 350 was available for rent...for $3,200 per month. Here's how it worked:

Its design was motivated by the need for real time accounting in business. The 350 stored 5 million 6 characters (3.75 megabytes). It had fifty 24-inch (610 mm) diameter disks with 100 recording surfaces. Each surface had 100 tracks. The disks spun at 1200 RPM. Data transfer rate was 8,800 characters per second. An access mechanism moved a pair of heads up and down to select a disk pair (one down surface and one up surface) and in and out to select a recording track of a surface pair. 

It will be interesting to see where we are in another 55 years.

In 55 years we'll be able to keep a copy of everything ever created on a nanostorage device invisible to the human eye.