Today's $60 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the '50s | Hacker News Reader

Today's $60 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the '50s

computerworld.com

15 pointsjaybol22 comments

Quote:

'One way he [Al Hoagland] tries to illustrate the importance of modern storage systems to school children for whom technology is ubiquitous is to ask them a random question, such as "What's the height of the Hoover Dam?" When the kids all jump on a nearby computer to search for the answer, he then asks them where the information came from...

'They just stare. It's a total blank," he said. "That's the frustration when you worked on something to make that possible, but you're not even recognized. Most people just want to see a 3D movie, they don't much want to know what made it possible.'

Says a lot about today's society.

I was with him until the 3D movie part. Who actually wants that?

Lots of people do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)#Box_office

Sure, but you can understand some level of apathy for those details in most people. We're all "tech" people and so such details are going to interest us.

But do you wonder in any depth how, for example, that bottle of milk made it to your fridge (the answer is not necessarily all that simple). Even some of the more technically minded programmers I know have zero interest in how a CPU works on a physical level and how they were developed :)

But one of those kids he describes might have a deep interest in how to get eggs from chickens, or how to cut hair, or.... you can never really predict what it is that will arrest them.

(case in point; I was trying to teach my scouts about how GPS worked the other day and they kept getting distracted with how the GPS enclosure was moulded [because of the odd shape]. No interest in the technology :))

I've never had much concern about people's disinterest in how tech works, so long as there are enough of is who do care :)

The iPad's storage would've been adequate 10 years ago? I'm pretty sure I didn't have a laptop with 32-64GB of storage in 2000 and I did just fine.

My current laptop drive is about 100GB (SSD) and it's pretty roomy (considering I store my big media on an external 1TB USB drive).

I remember back in the day, my first very own computer (Pentium 2, 266Mhz) had a 6.4GB drive and I could still put a bunch of games & applications on it without worrying about disk space. These days, a single game like starcraft 2 requires around 9 gigs of disk space.

It's crazy to think that 10 years from now, your average application will require 100GB of disk space, which will still be nothing compared to your 10TB drive. Maybe future games will be packaged in their own virtual machine since everyone will be running a hypervisor normally.

Assuming a linear model, and that compression won't improve.

> It's crazy to think that 10 years from now, your average application will require 100GB of disk space

Doubtful.

Outsite of games, "your average application" is still mostly in the 10~100MB range, and generally on the lower end of the spectrum. And I'm talking desktop: on OSX, Acorn is 35MB, Address Book is 20MB, Adium is 73MB, Camino is 48MB, Colloquy is 22MB, Delicious Library 2 is 42MB, Divvy is 3.7MB, ForkLift is 25MB, Handbrake is 15MB, iCal is 53MB, mail is 77MB, Reeder is 9.3MB, RipIt is 6.6MB, …

Of course on the other hand Emacs is 133MB, iMovie is 256MB, iTunes is 158MB.

But really, games and multimedia (video and audio) are the eaters of disk space. In no small part because games are full of multimedia data and multimedia files are simply huge as they're continuously increasing in quality.

OS X programs are a really bad benchmark for average program size. Many of them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel -- so that inflates the size significantly. OS X also just tends to have bigger applications, I'm not sure what all is in there; maybe larger icons or maybe OS X just requires a lot of extra big files somehow.

For instance, the VLC 32/64-bit package for Intel on OS X, which is the first linked download and the one users are mostly likely to click, is ~40MB whereas the Windows download is ~20MB (the OS X 32-bit only is ~24MB). The Arch Linux package is a 6MB download.

Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for emacs (http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/) is 89.7MB installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

So really the space requirements will even less for non-OS X users.

You pretty much nailed it, but one additional factor is that application "bundles" in OS X frequently include all the required libraries required to run the application, rather than linking against shared libraries. The only shared libs you can really count on are the ones provided by the OS, so if you need something newer, or different, many app developers simply bundle the library with their application.

> Many of them contain two binaries -- one for PPC and one for Intel

Actually, most of them nowadays would contain i386 and x86_64 code, but for most big software the major contribution to size is (as with games) assets rather than binaries.

For instance, Acorn has a dual-arch binary weighting 5.5MB, or about 15% of its total. A single-arch binary file would shave about 7% off the application. Not exactly significant.

For Address Book, the dual-arch binary is 319K (out of 20MB), Adium packs two architectures in a 3.9MB binary (about 5% of the total package size), …

> Stuff on OS X just takes a _lot_ more disk space. Arch Linux's package for emacs (http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/emacs/) is 89.7MB installed, whereas your post indicates that on OS X emacs consumes 133MB.

Not all of the difference comes from the binary by a long shot: the binary itself is 33MB and triple-architecture, even single-arch the package would be around 110MB. The Arch Linux package might not contain compiled elisp files for instance.

In the early 1980s my dad brought home a 5mb hard drive. It connected to our Atari 800 through the Atari's four joystick ports, and cost $5000. A lot can change in 25 years.

And this article makes it also perfectly understandable why software in those days would store years as '85' instead of '1985'.

It just leaves me wondering, if space was so important, why represent numbers as character data/BCD? I'm assuming it must have been some holdover from punchcards or some other input format?

Weird http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050168

Today's $60 1TB drive would not have been possible in the '50s for any price. Equal storage capacity? Sure. Equal storage density, power usage, throughput speed, seek times? So much beyond simply impossible that it's not even funny.

It also would have encompassed several factory spaces.

... jumping into my DeLorean DMC-12

it's probably more like $120 in Italy, just to give you the idea...

Source? Because in France depending on the site/boutique it can be as low as $58… including VAT [0], though the lowest prices are generally ~$70 (again, including a 19.6% VAT) [1] [2]

[0] http://www.rue-montgallet.com/prix/acheter,wd-1to-s-ata-ii-8...

[1] http://www.materiel.net/disque-dur-3-5-pouces/hitachi-deskst...

[2] http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00095581.html

I don’t think that’s the case. You can get 1TB drives from amazon.it for €53 ($70) [1] which closely mirrors prices in other European countries, for example Germany [2]. I didn’t even look for the cheapest drives, just the first one that came up.

[1] http://www.amazon.it/Samsung-HD103SJ-Spinpoint-F3-HardDisk/d...

[1] http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-Spinpoint-HD103SJ-interne-Festp...

ops, sorry, I thought we were talking about external drives.

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