« Sick as a Dog
Switching Gears on New Project »

40MB Hard Drive, Only $40,000

Posted January 13, 2006 at 8:48 pm in Unsorted

Ahh, remember the good old days of 1985? Ronald Reagan was sworn in for a second term, Microsoft pops out the first version of Windows, Knight Rider is still kicking ass on TV and a 40MB hard drive could run you $40,000.

$40,000 Hard Drive

Now, I know this wasn’t the base price for all hard drives in 1985, but considering the price difference a 250GB drive can go for today (I’ve seen them between $100 - $1,100), this doesn’t shock me. Then if you further consider the size, nor does the 6GB in the background being listed as $400. After all, those SD cards for my digital camera run about $100 per GB.

What does crack a smile for me are the two facts I put together about this. Math is fun!

  1. If you take inflation into account, that $40,000 in 1985 would run you around $70,986.45 today.
  2. Doing the math, you’re talking about $1000 per MB. Since a GB is 1024 MB, that puts the 1985 price of of that 6GB drive in the background around $6,144,000. That’s around $10,903,519.35 today

Fun side note about how things work on the internet: I found this from a post on Digg. This pointed to an article on TecheBlog which was crediting OhGizmo! as the source which was crediting tuaw.com with the find. Being an Apple blog, I wouldn’t rule them out as the seed for all this, but it would be fun to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.

RSS 2.0

5 Comments

  1. 1 Aquilo Jan 14th, 2006 at 12:01 am

    6gigs for $400 where are they buying there hard drives? you can get 80gigs for under $100! maybe in 1998 6gigs would be $400!

  2. 2 Juvenall Wilson Jan 14th, 2006 at 6:41 am

    Well, it’s all about size, really. The drive in the background is amazingly small. So if you think about other types of portable media, like the SD card in my digital camera, they tend to run about $100 a GB. Doing that math, you’re really saving like $200 there..rotf. :D

  3. 3 Omar Jan 14th, 2006 at 11:44 am

    LOL Nice math, Juvie! No way would anyone pay $10,903,519.35 for a 6 gig hard drive.

  4. 4 got detroit » d-blogger: gematria Jan 17th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    [...] 3.Juvenall Wilson (39) Finally, some fun computer facts. After only one visit, we learned that if the 6 Million Dollar Man had been built in 1985, he would have been nothing more than a 6GB hard drive. Sasquatch would have so kicked his ass. [...]

  5. 5 When is valium prescribed. Aug 5th, 2008 at 11:10 pm

    When is valium prescribed….

    Valium prescribed for….

Leave a Comment