I just got an email from Ebuyer, they're offering a 2Tb Western Digital "Green Caviar" hard disc drive (hdd) for £69.99. This is an impressive price for an impressive amount of space. Sorry for the techie bit, but 1 byte holds one of 256 numbers 0-255, and this is used, for example, to signify a text character. 2Tb is just over 2,000,000,000,000 bytes.Like anal sex, this got me thinking. My first ever hard disc was bought in 1988 (as far as I can remember) and cost £400 for a mere 20Mb of storage space. That's just over 20,000,000 bytes, fact fans. To put that into perspective, I have single MP3 files that are bigger than that now, and high definition videos that are thousands of times bigger. The punchline? I bought it second-hand at that price.
Further back than that - I'm guessing around 1983 - my mate Mark (Teddy) Edwards who had a rich dad and a remarkably flat face bought a floppy disc unit for the astonishing price of £800. This huge lump of a machine held around 160,000 bytes on a single side of a 5.25" (very) floppy disc and was very, very slow. But it was a joy to use besides the awful cassette tape storage solutions of the day, I was very envious.
So, from around 1983 to 2011 we've gone from an £800 unit to a £69 unit that holds over eleven million times the information. It strikes me that in many areas I've been disappointed in the progress of technology during my lifetime - where are the retinal scan goggles, the virtual reality recliners and the holographic 3D technologies I dreamt of as a lad? - but in the world of storage things have been different. They've shown fast progress which has easily kept pace with the average amount of storage we all need - or even superseded it.
Happy new year.
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