100’s of GB’s… I mean it’s crazy when you think that uncompressed a decade of usenet posts is only 10GB. Let that sink in, it took a decade of thousands on thousands of users to type in 10GB worth of ASCII. Now it’s something trivial to store. It’s partly why I always laugh at these ‘using windows 98 for my daily machine’ type posts. If you had a middle of the line machine form 1998, it wouldn’t be able to handle even the most basic tasks today, and you’d find it’s CPU incredibly overwhelmed with the simplest of web pages. Just as the storage requirements for programs today is so insanely huge compared to before. A Pentium 90, with 16MB of ram, and a 200MB disk would be ‘nice’ back then, but it’d be a joke. It may as well be a Commodore 64. But of course there is a tcpip stack for the c64, but other than simple 1970’s style stuff you aren’t doing anything with it.

First hard disk I had was a broken 3rd hand Miniscribe MS-8425. The spindle would get stuck but if you opened it up and gave it a twirl, then applied power it’d work. The disk lasted me about 6 months, which is about 5 months longer than I had thought. At the time I was moving away from my beloved Commodore 64, to a 10Mhz 286 with 1MB of ram, and now an awesome 20MB fixed disk. I thought it was an incredible amount of storage, which I quickly ran out of. Stacker saved the day, but in the end the disk died, and I upgraded to some slightly better MFM disks. I didn’t get an IDE disk until much later, and they were so incredibly fast compared to the old MFM/RLL even with 1:1 interleaving.

I didn’t get 16MB of ram until 1993 or 1994. But by then I had this monstrous CDC/Seagate Wren ST4702N 94181-702 that was 760MB SCSI! I still had a 40MB & 100MB IDE disks, which I could balance the OS on the 100, swap on the 40, and data on the SCSI. I was lucky enough to have separate controllers for each disk, so Linux and NT didn’t seem so bad. Although I, like everyone else was already giving up on OS/2, especially with Windows NT 3.5’s super easy PPP dialer, and ‘big’ programs like Mosaic just working out of the box.

Even used went up, it’s crazy! But ram has always been a fickle cash cow.

16mb is enough for a bare instance, I have about 86 GB available!

I was browsing newegg a few days ago, noticed some 4TB SSD for $1500… I think my first IDE drive was 10MB, and was really really slow.

Maybe I’m just old.