<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nThat’s one gigabyte of storage twenty years ago and today. Look at that 1987 behemoth. You just know the thing is a spine-pulverizing anchor<\/i> to lug around. <\/p>\n
The comparison above is a bit apples to oranges though, since we’re comparing two different storage mediums. Still, it’s easier to show the memory card than it is to show 1\/500th<\/sup> of a modern drive, and I’ll bet the size comes out roughly the same. Someone posted that picture in the FTB forums<\/a>, and Flaming Penguins posted this in reply:<\/p>\n Back in 1993 I had a job that involved working with and caring for a dusty old mainframe. It was a hot, vibrating, noisy creature. A cruft golem. It had circuit boards the size of motherboards, and motherboards the size of a ship’s rudder. The hard drives were massive, shuddering engines of storage. Their combined volume approached that of major household appliances, and I’m sure it didn’t exceed a gigabyte. In short, the hard drive pictured above would have been a major leap forward for us. It was a strange system. It had a proprietary inventory \/ order system that ran on top of a proprietary operating system. Holy double yikes. Our sysadmin’s job was equal parts IT and necromancy.<\/p>\n Perhaps this is where I acquired my love of steampunk. While my job description didn’t require me to shovel coal into the howling iron thought apparatus<\/em> while keeping an eye on the steam pressure, there were many days when such clarity of purpose and straightforward interface would have been welcome. <\/p>\n
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