I've been rereading Charlie Stross's Accelerando stories, so I found myself calculating aloud while █████ and I were buying storage space at J&R yesterday. My new hard drive cost $349, which comes out to a little over 87 cents a gig.
About 10 years ago, when I was buying a new PC, I thought I was doing well with a 120 megabyte drive, which probably ran me about $300, if I remember correctly. That was $2.50 a meg, in other words. At those prices, just one gigabyte of memory would have cost me $2,500 (nearly 3,000 times as much as it does now), and 400 gig would have cost a cool million dollars. A million dollars. (Not to mention how unwieldly it would have been to attach 3,333 120 Mb drives to my box!)
Now I have that much storage sitting on my desk, and it's about the size of a trade paperback.
Is that a singularity I spy ahead?
