I remember my father installing a 250 MB "hardcard" into our computer at home, and marveling at how we'd NEVER fill it up.

It's an interesting thing, because it's naive in a very particular way, but it's also more true than most people would guess.

And that's photography.

A single photograph requires a bunch of megabytes to store properly. Videos require tens of thousands of frames.

If you were working with text, it would still be easy to fit everything you needed in 250MB.

>It's an interesting thing, because it's naive in a very particular way,

Well given the time period we're talking about, mainstream home computing was much younger, the user base was much smaller, and people's experience and expectations were a bit more limited.

We're 25 years removed from the first Pentium CPU's. But Pentium CPU's are only 15 years removed from the first x86 CPU's. Our perceptions are much different now because we've experienced more and this technology is much more embedded in nearly everyone's lives as compared to 30 years ago. Even if you're a latecomer there's still 20-30 years of history to draw on that we didn't use to have. And no one is questioning "how will I ever use 500GB of SSD space..."

There were no consumer digital cameras when 250MB drives were common. The closest, Sony Mavicas, were still writing to analog media. Kodak was still using bulky briefcase storage units with their own hard drives. Not something the everyday "naive" computer user of the era would be investing in.

But when you're talking about "ever", you shouldn't be looking at what you can easily do today. Computer graphics existed. TV existed. "Ever" should include all of that.

And especially, it should occur to people that they want to mirror/replace their filing cabinets with computers. Filing cabinets that are full of both text and photos.

The Casio QV-10a was released in 1995 - that was a consumer digital camera. Although I wouldn't even call 250MB "common" then based on historical prices and my memories.

In '95 consumer grade computers were shipping with between 512MB and 1GB. 250 MB was common in the early 90's before the first wave of consumer digital cameras.

> In '95 consumer grade computers were shipping with between 512MB and 1GB.

Do you have a source for that? I bought a consumer grade computer in 1995 and it only had 120MB of disk space. And the historical prices suggest that 250MB was beyond consumer prices until ~1995.

http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte suggests 250MB would have been >$500 until 1994. Which is nowhere near "consumer" price.

Yep, people do it with email all the time. I think I have under 200MB and I have in the tens of thousands of plain text emails from mailing lists.

True, but email is pretty crufty with headers and markup, and that compounds with the flotsam of unread spam retained out of laziness, and for the sake of completion. Not to mention that duplication occurs with the endlessly indented prior messages retained in lengthy reply chains across all conversation participants. Compression of that kind of information helps, but compression only attacks the problem only in the usual blind, robotic manner.

I’d estimate that high definition video has similar problems, in that 24 hours of a pitch black screen with an ambient noise floor, captured at 4K screen resolution, and 240 frame rate, would still eat up 1TB, even with an efficient codec, because imperceptible thermal noise in the frames leaves a lot of uncompressible variation in the pixel raster, even though the actual color differences are imperceptible to people.

My dad and I once asked a computer repair guy to replace our hard drive and picked a 1 GB hard drive, and we similarly thought "WE'D NEVER FILL IT UP!"

Now we get watches with 8 times as much storage.

My first hard drive was a 20 MB monster in an 8088 "laptop"; my computer prior to that had 180K 5.25 floppies, so I thought I'd never run out of room...

My first hard drive was a shared 10MB drive on a 'server' that 2 other people used. My diskless workstation (CTOS AWS for what its worth) had dual floppies where I held my source code and build. The tools were downloaded from the 'server'.

In high school, I recall drooling over a 1GB hard drive in Computer Shopper magazine for $1,699.

I'm guessing that in 30 years we'll be looking at 1PB drives in the $150 range, inflation adjusted. What a time to be alive.

That seems pessimistic to me. There was, what, a 8,000-fold increase in capacity over just the last 20 years? That should get us to an exabyte rather than a petabyte for $150 in the next 30.

At some point the laws of physics kick in. Physics already flattened out the CPU curve years ago.

At some point.

The flattening of the CPU speed curve wasn’t matched by the GPU performance curve. The difference between linear computation and graphics cards is the latter is parallelizable, and the former is not. Flash is also trivially parallel.

Even with perfect materials, a 10 millimetre CPU couldn’t be faster than about 30 GHz because of the speed of light, but even current microSD cards have enough bits-per-unit-volume to put 1.2 petabytes in the largest current standard form factor of hard drive (at a cost of £704k/$982k/€798k). I don’t know how much of that volume is wasted on plastic casing or circits that would be redundant if you really wanted the highest possible density, but then again I also don’t know how much waste heat they produce either.

My claim is primarily that costs can and will fall, as to presume capacity will rise requires something that uses a lot more data than even high quality video currently uses. (Full mind backups would be one of those things, but IDK when to expect that).

similar when I was younger, but it was one of the smaller gig hard drives where I was like "wow, they've hit the point I'll never be able to fill this thing."

Those were innocent times.

I've said "Wow, I'll never fill THAT drive" many times in my life, and wouldn't you know it, I'm always wrong. I stopped saying that years ago; guess I can learn.

I wonder how many of us have onion shells of data on their harddrives.

Being lazy means to just copy the full old drive onto the new one, including images of nested older drives.

I used to have a directory oldstuff and newstuff. When I got a new hard drive, I'd copy the entirety of the old disk into the "new" oldstuff. I think I got 6 layers before I decided to ditch that advanced sorting method.

I have deeply deeply nested folders named "Desktop mess" from several decades worth of migrating MacOS hard drives and computers... I _mostly_ do a better job with complete drive images though... I do have a shelf full of drives that got taken out and archived when Time Machine filled them up (all of which I went carefully hunting through when bitcoin hit $10,000 and kept going up...)

Horror vacui

For quite a while, up until maybe 10 years ago, every hard drive I bought had more capacity that all the other hard drives I'd ever bought added together.