Just now I got spam from MacMall offering, among other things, 160-gigabyte firewire drives for $179. (That's not the cheapest you can get them, but it's a nice convenient number.)
I bought my first 20-megabyte drive (for a Mac II) in 1988 for the exhorbitant sum of $605 (I was about to become unemployed, so why not splurge). In the ensuing 16 years, the price of disk storage has gone from roughly $30/megabyte to roughly $1/gigabyte. That's a factor of 30,000. If you allow for inflation, the amount of disk you can buy a retail for a dollar has pretty much doubled every year.
Remember that fable about the chessboard and the grains of rice? We're a quarter of the way there.
Posted by wallich at February 5, 2004 11:35 PMThat's right about on the trend line, if price per megabyte dropped by a factor of 33 between '82 and '88. Of course, you can get drives even cheaper now than macmall prices, but in the kind of game a factor of two or so doesn't really change things much...
Posted by: paul at February 6, 2004 09:52 AM