When I transferred the contents of my old Mac Pro to my new iMac, I used an 8T external drive. That’s 8,000 times the size of a 1G drive.
My brother’s first computer (a SOL in 1977) came with a standard 8K of RAM. He splurged a couple of hundred bucks and got the one with a 16K upgrade.
I don’t think that is how Bitcoin works.
If only.
So if my arithmetic is correct, a TByte of memory would cost $80 billion.
But I recall that even in 1982, I bought 64KBytes of memory for about $100. I make that only 1/50 cent per bit. Only 9 years after that prediction.
What was his prediction, though? If it was “some day, memory prices will be less than or equal to 1 ¢/b”, and fewer than ten years later memory could be had for 0.02¢/b, then his prediction was absolutely correct.
P.S. as for computer memory costing “a lot”, talk to people who ordered some in the 1940s and 1950s. Not sure what that is supposed to prove; anyway, those prices pre-date Moore’s Law and even some types of transistors.
PPS. OK, according to Wikipedia, the price of 1 magnetic core “fell to US$0.0003 by 1970. By 1970, IBM was producing 20 billion cores per year.” So I’m not sure what was up with Ed Fredkin’s supposedly bold 1973 prediction.
I’ve been keeping track of what I’ve paid for hard drives for thirty years. In 1993, a 340MB drive cost $1,226.47 per gigabyte. In 2002, an 80GB drive cost $1.81 per gigabyte. In 2009, a 1000GB drive cost $0.109 per gigabyte. And most recently in 2019, a 6000GB drive cost $0.022 per gigabyte. (All of these are conventional spinning hard drives I bought as replacements or upgrades to the drives that came in computers I bought or built separately.)
Around this time was the magic date when hard drive storage (at the ‘value’ size) fell below the cost of floppy disk storage.
He was talking semiconductor memory, which was more expensive back then. The PDP-11/20 I used a year later was all core. And a penny a bit was hardly the end.
I don’t remember a discussion of Moore’s Law, though Gordon Moore came to the class, I think, and talked about the very first Intel microprocessors.
Fredkin also talked about his universe as a simulation idea, so I’m not saying he was always right.
Oh, and while Moore’s law had a beginning, when Moore expressed it, Gordon Bell showed that you could track it backwards in time and it still held.
I remember seeing the Apple ProFile, 5 MB hard drive that was $3,500. 5MB!! We’ll never use all of that.
Fast forward to today, it would hold a single MP3 or less than a single photo.
The 1TB USB flash drive I bought turned out to be faulty, and if you look at the customer reviews on the cheap 1TB USB Flash drives it looks like they all mostly suck. Some seem to be outright frauds, not supporting USB 3 as advertised and even having much less capacity.
I remember that drive, beige Apple II color and big as a small VCR with a grey serial cable for the interface, it was super slow. I don’t remember it being anywhere near that pricey.
This has been going on for a while, several years I think. On Amazon, and it’s telling they won’t crack down. It’s not defective, it’s outright fraud. The perps will init a (say) 1gb drive with a spoofed file system that looks as though it has 1ish TB free if you plug it in, but all the storage space is fake.
Its hilarious the specs what a $2500 top of the line computer in 1989.
The cheapness of storage is certainly incredible. I have something like 30 hard drives all together averaging probably at about 2TB each (from 256GB to 6TB over the years), so a total of 60 TB or so just sitting around the house. (No, it’s not porn; it’s photo archives mostly, in duplicate). I grew up in the 80s in the C64 days, so that’s the equivalent, if Google’s math is right, of about 176 million double sided floppies. It’s crazy to think.
As an aside, the cost of software/games in relation to their complexity is simply astounding, too. I remember something like an NES game costing about $40-$50 back then (about $100 or so in today’s dollars.) That’s crazy. Your mobile games are generally a buck or two, but once you get much over five or ten, people start bitching, and even your full-fledged desktop games never approach $100; probably more like $20 or so, which, at around ten 1988 dollars, would buy you some cheapie Mastertronic game.
When I expanded my RAM from 640k up to a full MB on my old 8088 in 1990 it cost about $100.
True - but… Once you set up the game and get up to level 2, you find that you can’t progress without paying for some upgrade features.
Most games are like this now. Free or cheap to get you interested and then needing more money to make them work.
At that price point? I haven’t seen it, only on the free games and perhaps real cheap ones. I don’t have a single Steam game that I’ve paid anything beyond the initial price for. For phone stuff, I actually avoid the free games, since I don’t want ads and I don’t want nags. They’re still only a couple bucks. And nothing wrong with “free to try” where you get just one level for a taste. That’s wonderful, too.
Maybe I’m missing something, jumping in here, but today’s AAA games for the PC run $49.99-$59.99. Some cost that, then they also have DLC. Battlefield 2042 will be out in October (allegedly) and will be $59.99. Borderlands 3 came out in Sept. 2019, and for the Ultimate Edition with all the DLC, it’s $98.87 on Steam (I’m holding out for a good sale on the latter.)
I don’t necessarily buy the latest greatest games, but I typically don’t spend more than $20-30 absolute tops on Steam for levels and hours of gameplay far beyond what a 1988 $50 cartridge would cost me. Games are dirt cheap now. I mean, shit, two or three buck games on the phone are nuts. I’ve been playing those Room games for a couple bucks a pop with my daughter on the iPad. My 1988 self could not imagine a future where I could play a game like that for just a buck. That’s like 10-20 minutes at the arcade.
Yeah, I try to wait for games to go on sale before I buy them. Games that are good, are still good a year later - except for games that are primarily multi-player games, like the above-mentioned Battlefield 2042. You have to get them when they come out or soon after, so that you can learn the game while everyone else is learning it, and so you have plenty of other people to game with.