And that's photography.
A single photograph requires a bunch of megabytes to store properly. Videos require tens of thousands of frames.
If you were working with text, it would still be easy to fit everything you needed in 250MB.
Well given the time period we're talking about, mainstream home computing was much younger, the user base was much smaller, and people's experience and expectations were a bit more limited.
We're 25 years removed from the first Pentium CPU's. But Pentium CPU's are only 15 years removed from the first x86 CPU's. Our perceptions are much different now because we've experienced more and this technology is much more embedded in nearly everyone's lives as compared to 30 years ago. Even if you're a latecomer there's still 20-30 years of history to draw on that we didn't use to have. And no one is questioning "how will I ever use 500GB of SSD space..."
And especially, it should occur to people that they want to mirror/replace their filing cabinets with computers. Filing cabinets that are full of both text and photos.
Do you have a source for that? I bought a consumer grade computer in 1995 and it only had 120MB of disk space. And the historical prices suggest that 250MB was beyond consumer prices until ~1995.
http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte suggests 250MB would have been >$500 until 1994. Which is nowhere near "consumer" price.
I’d estimate that high definition video has similar problems, in that 24 hours of a pitch black screen with an ambient noise floor, captured at 4K screen resolution, and 240 frame rate, would still eat up 1TB, even with an efficient codec, because imperceptible thermal noise in the frames leaves a lot of uncompressible variation in the pixel raster, even though the actual color differences are imperceptible to people.