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[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 41 points 1 week ago

This chart is total bullshit on past pricing. Lots of it is wrong. It's especially laughable to think that normal pc owners in 1999 were paying nearly $10,000 for a 20 GB hard drive. Let alone the cost 5 years before that. Lol

[-] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

To corroborate what you're saying, here's a Compusa ad from 1999. The desktops listed are much cheaper than the $450/GB price and come with, a whole computer around that hard drive.

Plus on page 12, there's an 18GB drive for $300, or $16.67/GB.

[-] tyler@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago

lol nobody had 20gb hard drives as “normal PC owners” in 1999. How old are you?

[-] quink@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

People very much had 20GB drives that year. Sure, 8GB, 12GB, 13.6GB we’re more common capacities but any mid to high-end system that didn’t have (near enough) 20GB was bad value and drives bigger than that were available.

[-] Psythik@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I'm sure they existed but only on high-end PCs. 20GB drives didn't become the norm for another two years. I remember; I was there.

[-] quink@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I replied to a post saying that nobody had a 20GB system. Sure it was more of a mid to high-end thing, but very much far from nobody.

And I was there too, the low end cheapo PC I got that year had 12GB.

https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World_9912_December_1999.pdf

And by 2001 that 12GB got an 80GB companion. Sure, 20GB was some low-end baseline maybe, but I had 12+80 by that year and it was in no way unusual.

Edit: and just checked the Wayback Machine for the local computer shop. The cheapest Celerons had 40GB. In 2001.

[-] tyler@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

I said no “normal pc owners”. Normal pc owners don’t have high end systems. I didn’t say “nobody”.

2 years in the late 90s early 2000s was a millennia. You can’t compare 99 to 01 in any manner.

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 week ago

Old enough that the first PC I built had bunches of dip switches you had to flip around so it would know what to do, depending on what you were putting in it. You ever overclock a cpu by 3Mhz before?

[-] mkhopper@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I would have killed for 20Gb of space in 1999 on my personal PC. People ran with nowhere near that much space back then.

I was also the administrator of an HP mainframe at that time, and we ran the whole business on about 5Gb, and paid big $$$ for it.

[-] aard@kyu.de 5 points 1 week ago

In '99 my 8GB disk died, and shortage of stock gave me a 12GB disk as warranty replacement.

[-] JordanZ@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

We had one of these 12gb quantum bigfoots(5.25” drive) in ~1998 or so. Here’s a publication saying it was expected to cost $490 at launch. That’s a far cry from ~$450 per gigabyte.

Edit to add inflation graphic. Doesn’t add up even after accounting for inflation.

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago

By late 99 you could catch 10GB drives on sale for $99, dude. If you were cool you bought two of them and ran them in a raid configuration so you had 20GB of space and your drives read/write was way faster. 20GB single drives themselves were still a few hundred, but that was it. I think my pc from like 1995 had 4GB drive in it to start with.

Regardless of anything else, the posted numbers are obviously wack.

[-] Psythik@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb

There is a difference between gigabytes and gigabits. 1 gigabyte (GB) = 8 gigabits (Gb)

[-] Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago

Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb

The irony... Nobody talks about bits when it comes to storage, it's basically only used for transfer speeds. So it should be pretty easy to infer by the context.

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago

Yes, and I think in the context, that is implied. I'm not a cable internet provider advertising "50 Mb" speeds and confusing people when they only get like 6MB.

this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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