
Today's $60 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the '50s - jaybol
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9201519/Computer_History_Museum_to_highlight_storage_from_RAMAC_to_microdrives
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Mithrandir
Quote:

'One way he [Al Hoagland] tries to illustrate the importance of modern storage
systems to school children for whom technology is ubiquitous is to ask them a
random question, such as "What's the height of the Hoover Dam?" When the kids
all jump on a nearby computer to search for the answer, he then asks them
where the information came from...

'They just stare. It's a total blank," he said. "That's the frustration when
you worked on something to make that possible, but you're not even recognized.
Most people just want to see a 3D movie, they don't much want to know what
made it possible.'

Says a lot about today's society.

~~~
jswinghammer
I was with him until the 3D movie part. Who actually wants that?

~~~
xiaoma
Lots of people do.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)#Box_office>

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dlsspy
The iPad's storage would've been adequate 10 years ago? I'm pretty sure I
didn't have a laptop with 32-64GB of storage in 2000 and I did just fine.

My current laptop drive is about 100GB (SSD) and it's pretty roomy
(considering I store my big media on an external 1TB USB drive).

~~~
catch23
I remember back in the day, my first very own computer (Pentium 2, 266Mhz) had
a 6.4GB drive and I could still put a bunch of games & applications on it
without worrying about disk space. These days, a single game like starcraft 2
requires around 9 gigs of disk space.

It's crazy to think that 10 years from now, your average application will
require 100GB of disk space, which will still be nothing compared to your 10TB
drive. Maybe future games will be packaged in their own virtual machine since
everyone will be running a hypervisor normally.

~~~
masklinn
> It's crazy to think that 10 years from now, your average application will
> require 100GB of disk space

Doubtful.

Outsite of games, "your average application" is still mostly in the 10~100MB
range, and generally on the lower end of the spectrum. And I'm talking
desktop: on OSX, Acorn is 35MB, Address Book is 20MB, Adium is 73MB, Camino is
48MB, Colloquy is 22MB, Delicious Library 2 is 42MB, Divvy is 3.7MB, ForkLift
is 25MB, Handbrake is 15MB, iCal is 53MB, mail is 77MB, Reeder is 9.3MB, RipIt
is 6.6MB, …

Of course on the other hand Emacs is 133MB, iMovie is 256MB, iTunes is 158MB.

But really, games and multimedia (video and audio) are the eaters of disk
space. In no small part because games are full of multimedia data and
multimedia files are simply huge as they're continuously increasing in
quality.

~~~
cookiecaper
OS X programs are a really bad benchmark for average program size. Many of
them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel -- so that inflates
the size significantly. OS X also just tends to have bigger applications, I'm
not sure what all is in there; maybe larger icons or maybe OS X just requires
a lot of extra big files somehow.

For instance, the VLC 32/64-bit package for Intel on OS X, which is the first
linked download and the one users are mostly likely to click, is ~40MB whereas
the Windows download is ~20MB (the OS X 32-bit only is ~24MB). The Arch Linux
package is a 6MB download.

Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for
emacs (<http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/>) is 89.7MB
installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

So really the space requirements will even less for non-OS X users.

~~~
masklinn
> Many of them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel

Actually, most of them nowadays would contain i386 and x86_64 code, but for
most big software the major contribution to size is (as with games) assets
rather than binaries.

For instance, Acorn has a dual-arch binary weighting 5.5MB, or about 15% of
its total. A single-arch binary file would shave about 7% off the application.
Not exactly significant.

For Address Book, the dual-arch binary is 319K (out of 20MB), Adium packs two
architectures in a 3.9MB binary (about 5% of the total package size), …

> Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for
> emacs (<http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/>) is 89.7MB
> installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

Not all of the difference comes from the binary by a long shot: the binary
itself is 33MB and triple-architecture, even single-arch the package would be
around 110MB. The Arch Linux package might not contain compiled elisp files
for instance.

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Luyt
And this article makes it also perfectly understandable why software in those
days would store years as '85' instead of '1985'.

~~~
MichaelGG
It just leaves me wondering, if space was so important, why represent numbers
as character data/BCD? I'm assuming it must have been some holdover from
punchcards or some other input format?

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elblanco
Weird <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050168>

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Sharlin
Today's $60 1TB drive would not have been possible in the '50s for _any_
price. Equal storage capacity? Sure. Equal storage density, power usage,
throughput speed, seek times? So much beyond simply impossible that it's not
even funny.

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ZipCordManiac
It also would have encompassed several factory spaces.

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igorgue
... jumping into my DeLorean DMC-12

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dotcoma
it's probably more like $120 in Italy, just to give you the idea...

~~~
ugh
I don’t think that’s the case. You can get 1TB drives from amazon.it for €53
($70) [1] which closely mirrors prices in other European countries, for
example Germany [2]. I didn’t even look for the cheapest drives, just the
first one that came up.

[1] [http://www.amazon.it/Samsung-HD103SJ-
Spinpoint-F3-HardDisk/d...](http://www.amazon.it/Samsung-HD103SJ-
Spinpoint-F3-HardDisk/dp/B002MQC0P8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1293702645&sr=8-2)

[1] [http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-Spinpoint-HD103SJ-interne-
Festp...](http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-Spinpoint-HD103SJ-interne-
Festplatte/dp/B002MQC0P8/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1293702583&sr=1-3)

~~~
dotcoma
ops, sorry, I thought we were talking about external drives.

