this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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This chart is total bullshit on past pricing. Lots of it is wrong. It's especially laughable to think that normal pc owners in 1999 were paying nearly $10,000 for a 20 GB hard drive. Let alone the cost 5 years before that. Lol
To corroborate what you're saying, here's a Compusa ad from 1999. The desktops listed are much cheaper than the $450/GB price and come with, a whole computer around that hard drive.
Plus on page 12, there's an 18GB drive for $300, or $16.67/GB.
lol nobody had 20gb hard drives as “normal PC owners” in 1999. How old are you?
People very much had 20GB drives that year. Sure, 8GB, 12GB, 13.6GB we’re more common capacities but any mid to high-end system that didn’t have (near enough) 20GB was bad value and drives bigger than that were available.
I'm sure they existed but only on high-end PCs. 20GB drives didn't become the norm for another two years. I remember; I was there.
I replied to a post saying that nobody had a 20GB system. Sure it was more of a mid to high-end thing, but very much far from nobody.
And I was there too, the low end cheapo PC I got that year had 12GB.
https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World_9912_December_1999.pdf
And by 2001 that 12GB got an 80GB companion. Sure, 20GB was some low-end baseline maybe, but I had 12+80 by that year and it was in no way unusual.
Edit: and just checked the Wayback Machine for the local computer shop. The cheapest Celerons had 40GB. In 2001.
I said no “normal pc owners”. Normal pc owners don’t have high end systems. I didn’t say “nobody”.
2 years in the late 90s early 2000s was a millennia. You can’t compare 99 to 01 in any manner.
Old enough that the first PC I built had bunches of dip switches you had to flip around so it would know what to do, depending on what you were putting in it. You ever overclock a cpu by 3Mhz before?
I would have killed for 20Gb of space in 1999 on my personal PC. People ran with nowhere near that much space back then.
I was also the administrator of an HP mainframe at that time, and we ran the whole business on about 5Gb, and paid big $$$ for it.
We had one of these 12gb quantum bigfoots(5.25” drive) in ~1998 or so. Here’s a publication saying it was expected to cost $490 at launch. That’s a far cry from ~$450 per gigabyte.
Edit to add inflation graphic. Doesn’t add up even after accounting for inflation.
In '99 my 8GB disk died, and shortage of stock gave me a 12GB disk as warranty replacement.
By late 99 you could catch 10GB drives on sale for $99, dude. If you were cool you bought two of them and ran them in a raid configuration so you had 20GB of space and your drives read/write was way faster. 20GB single drives themselves were still a few hundred, but that was it. I think my pc from like 1995 had 4GB drive in it to start with.
Regardless of anything else, the posted numbers are obviously wack.
Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb
There is a difference between gigabytes and gigabits. 1 gigabyte (GB) = 8 gigabits (Gb)
The irony... Nobody talks about bits when it comes to storage, it's basically only used for transfer speeds. So it should be pretty easy to infer by the context.
Yes, and I think in the context, that is implied. I'm not a cable internet provider advertising "50 Mb" speeds and confusing people when they only get like 6MB.