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The biggest advance in computer hardware is?

As someone who has been using computers since the late 1970s when the only real option was to build your own, I've made an observation.

It's pretty easy to marvel at just how fast and powerful modern CPUs have become but I don't think this is the most astounding thing that has happened in terms of hardware capability in the past 50 years.

Sure, the latest multi-core, hyperthreaded, 5GHz processor is a marvel of modern technology and a far cry from those early 8-bit devices such as the 8080 and Z80 on which I cut my teeth but there's something even more astounding.

I'm talking about storage -- both RAM and persistent media.

When I recall just how much each tiny bit of memory cost back in the 1970s and compare that to today's prices my mind is totally boggled.

Likewise, if you compare the capacity of those early RAM chips with the ones we use today the bang for buck change is almost incomprehensible.

The old 2114 RAM chips I used in some of my first computer projects had a retail price back then of (from memory) around NZ$40 and were a mere 4Kbits (1024x4) in capacity. They came in a 18-pin DIP package and were usually added in pairs so as to provide a whole 1Kbyte of storage.

Yeah, that's right... computer memory cost around $80,000 per megabyte back in the day and even though nobody would ever have done so, to build a 1MB RAM board would have required 2,000 of those chips drawing god-knows how much power.

Compare that to today. Now you can pick up a 32GB RAM card for as little as NZ$140 which equates to less than half a cent per MB.

RAM is now 160,000 times cheaper than it was back in the late 1970s, on a per-bit basis.

If only a few more other things in life had seen such a huge drop in price!

Then there's persistent storage.

When I started, the most common form of storage was the humble audio cassette tape which (if you were lucky) could load and save bits at the rate of about 300 per second, a mere 30 bytes. This was utterly impractical for storing data but was kind of useful for archiving programs you'd laboriously typed in over the period of several days.

The first really practical storage came in the form of floppy disks and I recall the joys of adding such a device to one of my early computers. I had a massive 85Kbytes of program/data storage at my fingertips and things loaded so fast I barely had time to take a breath.

Those early drives were not cheap however with a budget 5.25-inch unit costing well over $500 in most cases. Even with "double-density" becoming a thing, that meant you were paying around $3,000 per megabyte.

Today you can grab a 2TB spinner for about $125 so the cost per megabyte equates to something like $0.00006.

Stunning!

Remember also that these prices are not inflation-adjusted and that a 1979 dollar would be the equivalent of $6.80 today. This makes the price changes even more acute.

It's interesting to note that, unlike RAM and persistent storage, the price of CPUs has actually increased over the same period. Of course performance has also increased dramatically as well but back in 1980 the famous 6502 processor cost just US$25 but today's Intel i3 12100F is US$130.

As a side-note, I had a great deal of fun browsing the pages of the old Dick Smith catalogs while researching today's column. If you also have fond memories of those fantastic pages then you may find this link worth taking a look at:

Dick Smith catalog 1983/4.

Carpe Diem folks!

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