I had a bit of a double-take this morning that I wanted to share.
The first computer I used (an Apple IIe) had 64 kilobytes of RAM (actually, I guess it’s technically more correct to write kibibytes). The densest permanent storage I had access to were single-sided 5.25-inch floppy disks (I remember feeling quite proud when I got my first “notcher” which allowed me to put a professional-looking write-protect notch on the other side). I had to look up the exact number, but the Apple DOS 3.3 format stored 140KiB per side of a 5.25-inch floppy.
This morning, I did a double-take when I realized that I could store a 444 megabyte (mebibyte, actually) file on my hard drive without having to be concerned at all about the space consumed (it used less than 0.1% of the total storage on the drive).
That’s a comparison to give you an idea how far mass-produced, consumer-level technology has come in 30 years. 🙂