>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.