The first hard drive I ever bought was 212 megabytes. 1993.
I just upgraded the drives in my network storage box. I now have a whopping 4 terabytes of storage sitting in back of my monitor, purring away, quietly.
I'm old enough to remember when a "terabyte" was something we nerds would use as an impossibly huge amount of information, something nobody could ever possibly need (see also Bill Gates and "640K"), an amount so large that it could be used as a geeky synonym for "infinite".
Today, you can get a 1TB drive for under $90.
Hooray for technology!
Also, I wonder: do geeky kids today speak of mythical exabyte drives ?
In 1972 I convinced my employer that the minicomputer I used at work needed a hard drive big enough to support eight users.
We bought a 300 Mbyte Fujitsu Eagle.
The drive casing was 18 inches square and maybe eight inches high, with flanges to fit into the 19-inch rack chassis of our PDP 11/44. I’m sure it weighed more than 20 pounds.
It cost $10,000.00 dollars, which the inflation calculator tells me is over fifty grand in today’s money.
And we were very glad to have it.
Uh. 1982.
ah :)
had me scratching my head there.
Yeah, and when you run the inflation calculator for 1982 instead of 1972, it only cost my employer twenty five thousand or so of today’s devalued dollars, not fifty thou.
`Course, back when I was getting started, we had to hand-chip our own ones and zeros out of individual flint nodules. Then the first keyboards came along — just two keys, 1 and 0, and it was enough. I useta wear an onion in my belt …
212 MB? You were lucky. My first (somewhere around 1985) was 20 MB.
I just today ordered a 1 Terabyte LaCie drive to store photos on at work. $149. I could have had a MyBook for $109 at Staples, but I wanted FireWire connectivity.
That’s half what I paid for a 500GB MyBook a couple years ago.
Crazy.
In a good way.