$8 for standard shipping if you are not a member of amazon prime. probably still a good deal though.
Clearing out the USB 2.0 versions to make way for the 3.0 version?
A local Type House got a 5MB drive in the mid 80s; it was a little smaller than the one in the plane pic. That was the first time I heard the classic line “We’ll never run out of storage again.”
Dial up AOL-members amirite?!!
I am actually not. I don’t buy stuff through them with any regularity.
A good hypothesis.
On a side note, I wonder if SATA will be replaced with USB3 in some of lower-end computers…
You get the streaming, too, though. So it could be like Netflix, with free shipping.
That aspect has been tempting… a little more so for MrsTobinL than me.
Yes, they came down in size considerably by the eighties. But the price was still out of range for many, even by the mid-eighties (never mind the bold early adopters who bought them earlier).
I didn’t get a hard drive until late 1993, a whopping 80megs, a few hundred dollars, at least.
When I got a used computer to run Linux in mid-2001, the 200MHz, 16meg computer for $150 included a 2gig drive. The computer that replaced it in late 2003, a hand me down, had a massive 20gig drive.
I’ve got three 320gig hard drives lying around, found when three different people tossed their DVRs.
This is something nobody foresaw, endless and cheap storage, and we use it to store music and things too trivial to imagine back when hard drives cost real money.
The trouble is, the bigger these things get, the more there is at stake when you happen to lose or break one.
On the other hand, it probably means you can tote around a couple of really high-res movies instead of a bunch of lower-res movies
I did. I thought about that in the age of C64 and cassette tapes when hard drives were only at mainframes.
Extrapolate a couple orders of magnitude, and it gets fairly obvious.
Bought a 3.0 for the same price recently. Glad I jumped on that deal.
As I don’t have access to a large plane for my calculations, could you please express this data capacity in terms of station wagons? Thx.
The drive in the picture is a Drum Drive. There is machine readable substance in each of the grooves. There are read/write heads for each groove. In most cases the read/write heads were stationary.
…USB only, it appears.
What’s fascinating for me about that picture is not the size of the drive, but that the flight crew likely had no real comprehension of what it was they were carrying.
It makes me wonder what super esoteric thing computer scientists are working on now that will be common knowledge by everyone 60 years from now.
When they sent bits back and forth in the form of station wagons, 128 GB would have filled about a trillion parking spaces (not including access roads). At 12.5 square meters per bit, that’s 12,800,000 square kilometers—somewhere between the total area of Canada and that of Russia.
The march of miniaturization—starting with Saab-micron fabrication—quickly made such prohibitive hardware requirements obsolete.
And by $20, you mean $33, which is what it’s listed at.
