156 617 times cheaper
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
The first hard disk I bought was a 32MB hard card (the disk was mounted on a IDE controller card) for an Amstrad 1640, and it cost me £400 - around 1/3rd of a months take home pay - back in 1986 or so. That was about the same as I paid for the whole computer! Now, I use 32GB SD cards for music and dashcam in my car, and they cost me around £10 each - and the access time is several orders of magnitude higher: 90MB/sec compared with 32MB in several hours... :laugh: So go figure: in modern terms that would be £1200 ~ £1500 for 32MB: £42 per MB, against £0.0005 per MB today... And I doubted I would ever fill it :laugh:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
Member 7989122 wrote:
I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buc
You should also look at speed as a parameter. Speed has improved drastically and new storage options provide data much faster now.
Windows Store Apps - Sound Meter | Color Analyzer | Wallpaper Selector | Advertising Samples | World Cup Doodles
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
Member 7989122 wrote:
So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
True, but the bits value of what the bits store seems to have decreased in value as well. ;P
Latest Article - Code Review - What You Can Learn From a Single Line of Code Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
-
Member 7989122 wrote:
So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
True, but the bits value of what the bits store seems to have decreased in value as well. ;P
Latest Article - Code Review - What You Can Learn From a Single Line of Code Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
My thought as well. But then again: Those JPGs (or 256 color GIFs) files that we had on our 308 kbyte eight-inchers (that was actually a proprietary format - IBM stored only 256 kbyte on them) filled out that 14 inch CRT screen. If you display that same image file on a modern screen, the picture is no larger than a small dialog box with a single "Click OK to continue" button. Somehow, those images has shrunk a lot over the years. Not by a factor of 156 617, though.
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
Member 7989122 wrote:
Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte.
On top of that, we use about 150K times the amount of space for the same info. :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon
-
Member 7989122 wrote:
Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte.
On top of that, we use about 150K times the amount of space for the same info. :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon
The bad part of it is tha you don't even have to add a smiley ... In my student days, we ran a fully conformant ISO Pascal, requiring 17 k words, i.e. 34 kbytes, on a 16-bit minicomputer. That left 47 kword (94 kbytes) for the runtime data structures during compilation - enough space for the compiler to compile itself. (Luckily, the OS had its own set of page tables.) When installing Visual Studio 2017, I left out modules I certainly won't be using. The size on disk of what I need, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio and C:\Program Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio, is roughly 7 GBytes, or 200,000 times larger. Of course: That minicomputer Pascal was a bare bones command line thing. You can find similar bare bones compilers that are not 200,000 times larger - you don't even have to go to Linux for that. We could survive without all those add-ons (like some people do survive in a CLI-only Linux world, using cat 0 > myprog.pas to enter a Pascal source code file :-)). But we "want" it, just the way we want animated icons and bouncing paper clips ... Well, at least someone must have wanted that bouncing paper clip ;-). The difference between Pascal and C# isn't that big, essentially we got the same thing in the old days. Nah, OO is not that essential: My first programming professor taught us to define RECORD types to hold all the properties of an object, make sets of FUNCTIONs and PROCEDUREs as the only way to access the properties of those records. All functions/procedures should take a record instance as the first argument. When OO was later invented, all we did was moving the record name from the start of the parameter list to in front of the function name. Pure syntactical sugar. We did OO programming with that 34 kbyte Pascal compiler without knowing it...
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
Member 7989122 wrote:
So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
And that surprises you how?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
-
Member 7989122 wrote:
So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
And that surprises you how?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
Consider it an observation, not a surprise. I am more surprised when considering the cost of Super-8 movie film: I saved my weekly allowances for a year to buy myself a Kodak M14 back in 1968 (NOK 385 then, NOK 3600 or USD 440 today). The 3 min 20 sec film rolls cost NOK 47 then, today that would be NOK 440 after inflation adjustment. That is almost NOK 8000 (or roughly USD 980) per hour. My suprise lies not in the price itself, but in the filled shelves of Super-8 reels in my childhood - hours and more hours, from vactations, family parties, weekend trips... My mother was not working until much later, my father was rather moderately paid, yet they managed to pay for a new detached house where we moved in the same year as I got my Super-8 camera. How could they possibly affort that? I never knew. I don't think I could have spent that amount of money with a loan about ten times my yearly income, two school age kids and a wife with no income!
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
Hmm. I remember paying around $12 for a box of 2,000 blank punch cards in the university book store. At 72(*) useful bytes of data per card, that comes to $87.38 per MB, or about $2,860,000 for 32G (not including the truck(s) and fuel required to move that much data around). (*) Yes, I know cards had 80 columns. Only a demented Philistine would suggest using the numbering columns for data. I just bought a couple of 32GB sticks for $9.95 each. That's a ratio of about 288,000 to 1. Of course, back then I didn't need to carry around as many cat videos.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
The bad part of it is tha you don't even have to add a smiley ... In my student days, we ran a fully conformant ISO Pascal, requiring 17 k words, i.e. 34 kbytes, on a 16-bit minicomputer. That left 47 kword (94 kbytes) for the runtime data structures during compilation - enough space for the compiler to compile itself. (Luckily, the OS had its own set of page tables.) When installing Visual Studio 2017, I left out modules I certainly won't be using. The size on disk of what I need, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio and C:\Program Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio, is roughly 7 GBytes, or 200,000 times larger. Of course: That minicomputer Pascal was a bare bones command line thing. You can find similar bare bones compilers that are not 200,000 times larger - you don't even have to go to Linux for that. We could survive without all those add-ons (like some people do survive in a CLI-only Linux world, using cat 0 > myprog.pas to enter a Pascal source code file :-)). But we "want" it, just the way we want animated icons and bouncing paper clips ... Well, at least someone must have wanted that bouncing paper clip ;-). The difference between Pascal and C# isn't that big, essentially we got the same thing in the old days. Nah, OO is not that essential: My first programming professor taught us to define RECORD types to hold all the properties of an object, make sets of FUNCTIONs and PROCEDUREs as the only way to access the properties of those records. All functions/procedures should take a record instance as the first argument. When OO was later invented, all we did was moving the record name from the start of the parameter list to in front of the function name. Pure syntactical sugar. We did OO programming with that 34 kbyte Pascal compiler without knowing it...
I think you got me beat on the age, but I do recall the days of having to use floppies for storage where 300k+ was all the rage. Oh, then there was MFM, sweet MFM... I mean we're talking megabytes here. OMG. Just think... in 200 years, the kids will be saying the same thing about petabytes. "What do you mean you couldn't fit the entire data of the entire planet 20 times over in a tic-tac? Neanderthals they were."
Jeremy Falcon
-
In 1979, I was a student, buying 308 kbyte, 8 inch, floppy disk at NOK 40 (roughly USD 5) apiece. Considering inflation, that would be NOK 164 today, or NOK 532 per Mbyte. Today, I bought myself another 32 GByte USB memory stick at NOK 112, or NOK 0,0034 per Mbyte. So, today I get 156 617 times the amount of storage space per buck than I got as a student.
It's great reading all these "old guy" stories [as an old guy]. My 2nd favorite story is how it took three of us to carry a 600 MB hard drive up three flights of stairs (the A/C often failed which of course meant the drives would often fail). There's another unit of comparison: let's see, three young men might imply the drives weighed about 150 kg (Someone want to check that for me? They were DEC VAX drives). That's roughly 4 MB/kg :)
