Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/235024900/Unit-6-Analysis-1-Memory-Cost
Now think about the amount of storage we will have 45 years from now.
Probably going to cost that again soon if AI keeps eating the world.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
232 points (97.2% liked)
Today I Learned
30465 readers
945 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
And every step of the way, some assholes idiots inspired society to think "we will never need more than this"
Nice try, AI companies!
26 megabytes...who will ever need that much.
I know, right? I had a 20 MB drive on my Amiga. Plenty.
It’s not clear if the original adjusted for inflation. $5000 in todays money is $21,500
That ain't nowhere near enough to store the nudes your mom sent me.
It's funny to see cost per GB on the right. Back in 1980, most people didn't even know what a Gigabyte might be.
I always chuckle thinking about taking a 1TB Micro SD back in time and watching people’s heads explode.
I remember being in college in the very early 90s and a friend got a machine with 2 2gb hard drives and wondering what he was going to do with all that space. Now I have a NAS at home with something like 100TB and it’s almost 75% full.
Ahoy, matey! 🤣
It really is insane that 1TB micro SD cards exist now
Yes, it is:
Yeah but your crypto was safe, brah.
don't worry, at this rate we'll be back to that pricing in no time...
load more comments
(14 replies)
Local storage will be illegal in 45 years.
I didn't think about that, "you'll own nothing and be happy" plan...
And we'll probably have less cloud storage than we do now
load more comments
(1 replies)
And now is going back up. The lowest price was around 2014-2018. Now, 12 years later, HHD with the same size cost double the price of 2014.
I 'member getting two sheets of dot-matrix-printed bad blocks with my 26MB harddrive. It took forever to fill those in the BIOS for the XT controller.
My second computer had a 20 MB HDD and it was wonderful to have soooo much space compared to the previous computer which had no HDD and 3 floppy drives.
Then a year later I added a second 20 MB HDD and was absolutely swimming in space.
Back then a 'large' app was 100 KB. You'd spend all day writing code and produce a 13 KB file.
I can spend all day writing code and end up a couple kB lighter.
I remember my parents taking us to the Gateway store, and the guy who helped us said something along the lines of “This PC has 12 gigs; you’ll never run out of space!”
Napster hit the scene within a few months. Started getting “low disk space!” warnings real quick.
Musta been tough not having any phone line access for weeks, it’d take ages for gigs to fill up at 3-4kb/s!
It was a wild ride lol.
All the oldies flocking here to tell everyone about how cool their tiny hard drives were.
Hi, I had a 25mb hard drive and it was awesome. Technology!
Hi, I don't remember the size of my first HDD, I guess about 40 MB. Was a pretty big boy, filling a whole 5.25 " slot. What I remember most about it, was that my father told me to always park it.
Parking drive heads is indeed the term for the drive moving them off the platter, which it does when cleanly powered down to protect the platter.
searches
Apparently, though I wasn't aware of this until now, some DOS hard drives required manual parking by the user.
Hard drives have read/write heads which fly above the spinning disks when the drive is powered. When power is removed, the heads no longer fly... For a long time now, the arms which hold the heads have been designed to “auto-park” the heads away from the disks’ surface, or over a safe “landing zone”, when they lose power¹, but early (up to the mid 80s) hard drives didn’t have this feature, so their heads would land on the disk surface, which could sometimes damage the surface.
So early PCs had a PARK command which would park the heads away from the disk surface. Typically, this would attempt to move the heads past the last “official” cylinder (over an “engineering cylinder” on MFM and RLL drives), or, starting with ATs, use the landing zone specified in the BIOS drive parameter table (accessed using the vectors stored at interrupts 0x41 and 0x46). You can see one such implementation in Roedy Green’s PARK which comes with source code, or in Jim Leonard’s disassembly of SpinRite’s PARK.
On PCs with auto-parking heads, it was safe to wait for the DOS command prompt, and the lights to switch off: COMMAND.COM ensures that I/O is finished before it displays the command prompt (and in-memory disk caches are supposed to honour that too).
(In fact, this feature is what allows Roedy Green’s PARK to work too: you’d wait for the command prompt, so there’s no outstanding I/O, then run PARK, which would be loaded from disk, then run with no I/O apart from parking the heads, then either loop forever or return to the command prompt which would normally not result in any I/O either, so the heads would remain safely parked. SpinRite’s PARK waits for the user to press a key, so the user can power the computer off without pressing a key and thus ensure there’s no untoward I/O.)
New PCs in 1994 wouldn’t need this, but it was common for schools to have very old computers, and an early PC requiring PARK wouldn’t be unheard of. Old habits die hard too, so it’s possible that the advice to run PARK was kept alive long after it stopped being relevant, but that would have involved copying the PARK command since it was system-specific and not part of DOS.
If I remember correctly, IDE drives never needed PARK, so you’d only find it on PCs equipped with pre-IDE drives (commonly referred to as MFM or RLL drives).
I'm not sure what kind of drive it was. I remember using the park command in DOS but it's possible it wasn't actually necessary. I guess my father had experience with earlier drives and just assumed it was good practice. I also remember the park command caused some audible noise from the HDD. Probably some whirring and a click but I'm not sure about this.
Tbf, very few people had a hard disk at home in 1980. And if they did, it was a smaller capacity. The IBM PC XT shipped with a 10 MB drive in 1983.
I had a 186 (or possibly an 8088?) in the mid 80s as my first PC. It ran on two low density 5.25" floppy drives, with no internal HD. My uncle bought himself a new HDD and gave me his old 20MB drive. When I was next at the local computer store, I asked how much a 20MB drive costs, and my jaw hit the floor!
load more comments
(3 replies)
I remember getting my first 10MB hard drive, c. the 80s. I remember holding it in my hands and marveling at how I could put ten million bytes in this little enclosure and just... carry it around, if I so chose. Not that I was inclined to; that thing was heavy.
Eventually, after the drive failed, I took it apart and pinched the absolute fuck out of my finger between the two neodymium magnets. Blood was spilled.
Computers used to be fun. They still are, but they used to be too.
I remember getting my first Seagate ST-225 21 MB (no not a typo) drive for $800.
Apple coming in at the highest cost per GB sounds about right, but holy shit their price was absurd.
view more: next ›