The "Bad" Old Days

Credit: Vintage Computing and Gaming

This is a fascinating ad when you have the advantage of 26 years' worth of hindsight and technological improvements in computer memory. This company, Morrow Designs, had two hard disk drives available for sale in January 1981 (advertised in BYTE magazine): a 10-megabyte HDD for a mere $3,695, and a 26-megabyte HDD for only $4,995. That's in 1981 dollars. Factor in inflation and, today, the prices of those two hard drives would be equivalent to $8,451.63 and $11,425.14, respectively.

Now, factor in the technological improvements. The older of our two home computers has a 150-gigabyte HDD in it (I've used up about 65-70 gig in the three years or so we've owned it; the newer computer, I have no idea how much memory it has except that it's more). The first thumbdrive I bought, back in late 2003, was 128-meg for S$88 (that number's etched in my brain for some reason). The most recent thumbdrive that I bought was a 4-gig model for S$55.

Now if only cars and homes could have such huge increases in quality and decreases in prices.

(HT: IZ Reloaded)