It’s hard to imagine how far we’ve come until you see pictures like this of the first disk drive to store more than 1GB (right). The IBM 3380 which stored 2.52GB and cost between $81,000 and $142,000, not to mention the size! The image on the left is a 250MB drive from 1979. By way of comparison, you can now buy a 2 Terabyte drive for about $100.
To put it into perspective that’s roughly 1000x the storage for (best case) .0012 the price (i.e. just over 1/10th of 1% the price)! You now get about 1Million times more for your money!
Read more on the history of computer storage in pictures.
If you think those numbers are insane, you need to visit me at my office (Perot Systems). We’ve got a computer museum which contains a hard drive as big as my kid’s bedroom that barely holds 1 song worth of information.
Sounds like a trip I need to make! how far we’ve come….