Hey, you're talking to someone who actually remembers punched tape readers.
And all those little punched out bits of paper were collected in a 'bit bucket' that sat under the readers...
I just upgraded the hard drive on my laptop. Amazing - 120gig in something that would fit in a shirt pocket.
Back when I got out of school I went to work for Bell Labs. I was doing development work on early functional ATE systems. These machines used Control Data Corp. hard drives. These drives weighed ~150 pounds, were incredibly noisy, and used removable disk packs ~3 inches thick and about ~20 inches across. (That's 2.54 cm to the inch - you do the math.) These disk packs had this big honking handle on the top that you would lift till it was perpendicular to the housing, then lift the disk out of the drive.
That massive disk pack had 10 meg of storage. It would take 12,000 of them to hold as much as that little laptop hd. 12,000!!! That would fill my house, the shed out back, the garage... if I had a pool I could probably fill that, too.
Un freaking believable.