this is getting ridiculous
When I bought my first home computer back in the late 1990s it was right on the bleeding edge of technology, with something like 32 megabytes of RAM and an 8 gigabyte hard drive. My first iPhone had I think 2 gigabytes of storage.
Now, back then this was more than enough to store all your documents and a few low-resolution photographs scanned onto your hard drive. Anything else could be kept on a number of floppy drives. Remember those?
Anyway, just the other day I noticed that the solid state drive (SSD) I use to store my current year's raw photo files was getting near to full. I had only around 200 gigabytes left on my 1 terabyte SSD. So, I bought a larger, 2 terabyte drive and began the process of moving files around.
TWENTY terabytes!!!
Goodness only knows how many more times this is than my first computer with its tiny drive. In fact, I'll work it out… it's something like (hang on, I'll get there in a minute) 3000 times!
Thankfully storage these days is cheap, and a 2 terabyte SSD cost me £140. I have no idea how much this would have cost back in 1999. In fact, I'll look it up… it's something like £16000! That's right, back then storage cost around £8 per gigabyte compared to 7 pence per gigabyte now.
Terrifyingly (and while I have my calculator at hand) 20 terabytes of storage in 2000 would have cost me in the region of £160000 and probably required a room in my house to keep it all in. Today, all my storage fits unobtrusively underneath the monitor shelf on my desk, and all the back-ups fit in a small drawer in my bedroom.
Obviously advances in technology have led to miniaturisation both in terms of size and cost of computers, but I was staggered by how much. I guess in twenty-five years time we'll be storing all the data we own either in "the cloud" or on something the size of the smallest Lego block.
And it'll cost...
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