how things change...
Aug. 24th, 2003 02:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI was just now re-reading the intro to Michael Hart's first 9 documents released for Project Gutenberg, when he started it. Actually, I was reading a revised version.
He mentions that the original documents were typed in entirely in uppercase -- the multi-million dollar computer he was using didn't have lowercase back then. He also spoke of the storage medium: it was a diskpack "the size of a large cake in a cake carrier, cost $1500, and contained 5 megabytes".
Amazing! I can now buy a 40 gigabyte hard drive for around AU$300.
That is a capacity increase of 8,000 times... and a price reduction to about an 80,000th (comparing 5Mb then to 5Mb now)... over a period of just 32 years. And all that comes with a mind-numbing reduction of the size of the device -- 5Mb can now easily fit on a tiny chip of silicon with no moving parts.
How cool is that. :)
He mentions that the original documents were typed in entirely in uppercase -- the multi-million dollar computer he was using didn't have lowercase back then. He also spoke of the storage medium: it was a diskpack "the size of a large cake in a cake carrier, cost $1500, and contained 5 megabytes".
Amazing! I can now buy a 40 gigabyte hard drive for around AU$300.
That is a capacity increase of 8,000 times... and a price reduction to about an 80,000th (comparing 5Mb then to 5Mb now)... over a period of just 32 years. And all that comes with a mind-numbing reduction of the size of the device -- 5Mb can now easily fit on a tiny chip of silicon with no moving parts.
How cool is that. :)