What Is This - Quiz Answer

Okay, it's time to post the answer to the quiz from last week. The question was what is this thing?
Thank you to all who participated. There were many guesses - some serious and some not-so-serious (you know who you are!). The closest guess was made by one of Living with Hope's southern followers.

Congratulations Elsa! Your guess was that the easy-to-manage bundle pictured above was a computer. Technically, this was the closest guess to the actual answer.

Answer: Its a hard disk drive, circa 1956, with the memory storage comparable to 5MB of memory. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. Pretty interesting since most computers today arrive at our doorsteps with a minimum 100MB standard, not to mention weigh much less than 2000 lbs. Gotta love technology!