• ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 days ago

    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

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      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.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 days ago

        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?

    • mkhopper@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      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.

      • aard@kyu.de
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        5 days ago

        In '99 my 8GB disk died, and shortage of stock gave me a 12GB disk as warranty replacement.

      • JordanZ@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        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.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb

        There is a difference between gigabytes and gigabits. 1 gigabyte (GB) = 8 gigabits (Gb)

        • Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb

          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.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 days ago

          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.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 days ago

        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.