Moore’s Law! Maybe we’re about to hit its limits in a few years, maybe we aren’t, but for as long as we’ve been building computers, the roughly biannual doubling of computing power and storage for the same price has done remarkable things, not only at the Watsonian high-end, but in allowing consumers to buy $400 laptops with 4 GB memory and 500 gigs of storage. (Unless they’re Apple customers, of course.)

Ivan Smith highlights just how transformative the falling price of storage has been from 1981 until present day:

YEAR — Price of a Gigabyte 1981 — $300,000 1987 — $50,000 1990 — $10,000 1994 — $1000 1997 — $100 2000 — $10 2004 — $1 2010 — $0.10

(Ivan Smith via David Isenberg via Boing Boing. title pic — of one megabyte of data in 1961 — via How Good Is That)

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