by Dave Kennedy and William Murray

The first disk drive that I ever saw was the size and weight of a refrigerator and gave off as much heat. It would hold one megabyte. It was so expensive that it was far more likely to be used as a table than as a database. At the same time, the storage medium of choice was punched paper, cards or tape. A gigabyte in punched cards would fill a railroad box car.

The first hard drive that I bought was 10mb and cost me $3000 at IBM employee price. I thought I would never use it up. One can now buy a terabyte in a cigar box for $99 (I kid you not! It dropped in price while I was working on this post) and for $50 one can buy 320GB that will fit in one’s shirt pocket.

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