• ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    16 days 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

    • mkhopper@lemmy.world
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      15 days 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.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

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

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

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          15 days 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.

        • Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee
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          15 days 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.

      • aard@kyu.de
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        15 days ago

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

      • JordanZ@lemmy.world
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        15 days 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.

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      15 days 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.

      • quink@lemmy.ml
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        15 days 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 20GB was bad value and drives bigger than that were available.

        • Psythik@lemmy.world
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          15 days 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
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            15 days 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
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              14 days 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
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        15 days 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?