Obeying Moore’s Law
November 30th, 2008 by ComputerBob
A few decades ago, I worked for a couple of years as an end-user support guy in a departmental administrative office at a major midwestern university. At that time, all of the department’s PCs were IBM 5150s (the original IBM PC with two floppy drives and no hard drive). Secretaries would insert a DOS disk in the left floppy drive and their application of choice (usually WordPerfect) into the right one. There was no such thing as multitasking.
One of the things that I did to “modernize” the department was to install a 5MB, 5 1/4″ hard drive into each PC. That required me to first upgrade each PC’s power supply because the OEM power supply didn’t provide enough power to run a hard drive. I don’t remember how much those 5MB hard drives cost, but I think I paid around $59.95 (USD) for each of the 200-watt power supplies that I installed.
When finished, the resulting PCs had enough hard drive storage to hold DOS, WordPerfect and all the documents that anyone would possibly ever want to create. And they booted up in a fraction of the time that they had with only floppy drives.
Fast-forward to a couple of days ago, when I bought a tiny 8GB USB flash drive for only $14.99 (USD). It’s much faster than those first hard drives that I installed many years ago.
And it holds almost 1600 times as much data.
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