I was going through a spec for a media center machine for home and got to the point where I spec’d the hard-drives. It seemed silly to put in a 2TB drive given I already have masses of storage space. Then I thought about it and looked at the cost and realised it would be silly not to put in that much. The price has just dropped so much faster that we have found ways to use it (although we are getting better with HD videos and alike).

This got me thinking about how much space I actually have and what it would have cost at a time when we simply didn’t have this insane amount of space.

First I counted up all the digital storage I had to hand:

Then I looked into what that amount of storage (done in price per GB, not like for like) would have cost over the previous decade. Unfortunately I could only find prices in dollars so I looked up conversation rates at the time of the price which gave me the following data:

For real fun I then looked up the cost for 1981 using Apple hardware (with a cost of $700 per megabyte). I had to assume the exchange rate of 0.6 as I could not find the numbers. All of that came to £6,152,509,440. So by 1981 prices I have over 6000 million pounds worth of storage sat taking up photos and films…

By today’s prices all this comes to £436. Now that is progress.

References: Prices 1, Prices 2 and Currency conversion