A trip down memory lane

Scott Janousek just twittered about how you can pick up a 16GB USB memory stick for $30 these days. It made me think back to the first piece of memory I actually purchased. It was an upgrae for my Amiga 500 – an extra half-meg. It cost $75 for that 512 kilobytes.

I couldn’t help extrapolating that into the present. At $150 per megabyte, that’s $153,600 per gigabyte. Or over $2.4 million dollars for that 16GB stick that you can pick up at Circuit City for the price of a decent meal. Yikes.

Sounds insane, but then you dig up ads like this:

Of course, that’s a disk, but shows you how things have changed.

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2 Responses to A trip down memory lane

  1. chris says:

    You’ve just given a shiny example of how/why we shall all be immortal within 30 yrs. Exponential technological growth.

  2. adam says:

    I had the RAM expansion too. it was amazingly fast to run a program after copying it to the RAMdisk 🙂

    I’m not sure you can extrapolate immortality. Certainly some amazing things will occur, I’m just not sure we can predict what they’ll be. Consider that population and resource usage are also growing exponentially. So we might have the technology but only enough resources to make one in a million people immortal. Immortality would be great, but I’ll be content if we get something better than a robot uprising / “grey goo scenario” 🙂

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