Way back in the early 1990’s when I was introduced to real computers (That is if you call a Packard-Bell a real computer) as opposed to the VIC-20 and later Commodore 64 I previously owned I had hundreds of dollars invested in software.
I can remember back when I bought an upgrade version of Norton Utilities for DOS and when I tried to install it I found I didn’t have enough space left on my hard drive. Much to the chagrin of my wife I spent several hundred dollars to upgrade my hard drive to 32 MB. I was sure that it would be years before I had to spend that much money again for a hardware upgrade.
At that time all of my applications were MS-DOS based most of which were shareware I downloaded from bulletin boards via my Modem. I was a late convert to Windows because I hated all the clutter the lines and icons seemed to have created. It was not until I was asked to install a duplex receptacle for my friend Ralph Avers to plug his Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 computer into that I began the slow conversion to Windows. That was when my troubles really began as was reflected in my monthly bank account balance.
Windows was and always has been a disk space and memory hog. For a while it seemed like every year I was upgrading my hard drive, memory or even buying new computers to keep up with the demands placed on me by Windows and Windows based applications. I was so happy when hard drives broke the one GB barrier because I thought I would never use that much disk space…silly me!
Today I have hard drives from 80 Gig to 200 GB that cost mere pennies per MB. It was not until the mid 1990’s that the cost per MB dropped to about a dollar per MB and today the cost is about two cents per MB or about a dollar or so per GB.
Earlier this month I ran across a PC World article called “Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive”. In the article they stated that they expect to release the 1 TB drive in the first quarter of this year. Their drive called the DeskStar 7K1000 will sell at an estimated retail cost of $399.00. That incidentally is more than I spend for my 80 GB hard drive last year.
Let’s take a minute to put this in perspective. Just so that you know there are 1,048,576 MB in a Terabyte so if you do the math this drive would have cost $1,048,576.00 in the mid 1990’s. With inflation the cost would have been even more and only large corporations or government agencies could have afforded them.
No Comments