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Storage then and now.

MagwangMagwang Veteran
edited November 2010 in General Banter
If you assume $1000 for that heavy-looking disk pack, then that's a 100-fold improvement in 40 years.

Comments

  • MountainsMountains Veteran
    edited November 2010
    In 1995, I paid $100 per *megabyte* for RAM chips ($100,000/gb) for my then-new PowerMac 7100/80. Yesterday I purchased an 8 gb SD card for $14 (and probably could have found it cheaper if I'd shopped). If I have the math right, that means that today's memory is approximately 0.014% as expensive as it was 15 years ago. That's 14/1000 of one percent!

    Wouldn't it be nice if everything were that much cheaper?
  • MagwangMagwang Veteran
    edited November 2010
    I bought one of these in 1984:

    Compaq Portable Computer

    In November 1982 Compaq announced their first product, the Compaq Portable, a portable IBM PC compatible personal computer. It was released in March 1983 at $2995, considerably more affordable than competitors at the time. The Compaq Portable was one of the originators of today's laptop. It was the second IBM PC compatible, being capable of running all software that would run on an IBM PC.
    It was a commercial success, selling 53,000 units in its first year. The Compaq Portable was the first in the range of the Compaq Portable series. Compaq was able to market a legal IBM clone because IBM mostly used "off the shelf" parts for their PC. Furthermore, Microsoft had kept the right to license the operating system to other computer manufacturers. The only part which had to be duplicated was the BIOS, which Compaq did legally by using clean room reverse engineering for $1 million.

    Weight: 28 pounds.
    CPU: Intel 8088, 4.77MHz, RAM: 128K, 640K max
    Display: 9" monochrome monitor built-in 80 X 25 text
    Color graphic card
    Storage: Two 320K 5-1/4" disk drives, Ports: 1 parallel (expansion card)
    OS: MS-DOS

    678px-Compaq_portable.jpg
  • ShiftPlusOneShiftPlusOne Veteran
    edited November 2010
    I love old school computers. Might build an Apple 1 replica for the hell of it soon.

    The problem with storage is that it's getting bigger, but it's not getting faster. So people who upgrade their CPU and everything else, end up with a CPU that sits there waiting for the hard drives to provide data most of the time.
  • MagwangMagwang Veteran
    edited November 2010
    ShiftPlusOne wrote: »
    I love old school computers. Might build an Apple 1 replica for the hell of it soon.

    The problem with storage is that it's getting bigger, but it's not getting faster. So people who upgrade their CPU and everything else, end up with a CPU that sits there waiting for the hard drives to provide data most of the time.


    Yeah, I've always kicked myself for selling it..

    Disk is definitely now the limiting factor. I would look at solid-state drives. Boot Windows in 5 seconds!
  • ShiftPlusOneShiftPlusOne Veteran
    edited November 2010
    You had an original Apple 1? That's quite impressive. They can be sold for anywhere between 10k to 160k at auctions now.


    I don't feel like solid-state is quiet there yet. I'll wait for the technology to mature a little more.
  • ThailandTomThailandTom Veteran
    edited November 2010
    Transience is a wonderful thing is it not. Kudos to you :)

    The OP's picture is quite a striking and interesting contrast.
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