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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

My first day working at Google back in 2000 they had just inked an exclusive deal with a hard drive manufacturer for their brand new high-capacity 40 GB drives. They had a 4U rack stuffed full of 25 of them, and everyone was standing around oohing and ahing and saying, "Wow, that's a TERABYTE!"

Now the same storage is the size of a thimble.

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I remember I bought a 4.7GB Seagate hard drive, for $250, at 1997.

I remember my Dad buying a 20MB drive in 1993 for around double that..

I started a company, Corvus Systems, that sold 5 MByte hard disk drives for $4000. We sold a zillion.

Of course the competition was 74 KByte floppies at the time.

At the time I copied games for ZX-80 on a tape recorder. One 90 min cassette had 260KB of storage. And now IBM make a 330TB one.

Back in my day we only had stone tablets which had space for just one dot. A whopping 1 bit of storage! /s

That reminds me of the racks of 18GB Seagate drives Terraserver used for their maps storage. It was a nice double entendre of terra earth and tera 10^12

Are there archived photos from those days? I think that would be interesting to see

If you get a chance to go to the Google visitor office in Mountain View, they have old racks on display.