Re: Deflation
OK, I'll bite. In my first job I had to buy a DEC hard drive for a VAX 11/750. It cost £14K (and that's when £ bought stuff) and gave 600MB (yes that's an M). Size of a washing machine.
If you look here http://s3.computerhistory.org/groups/cdc-9760-smd.pdf you'll see a chart listing the drives at the first place I worked: 300 MB CDC removable disk packs. Each disk pack cost US$10,000. There were ten platters, with two $500 read/write heads each, for another $10,000. The drive enclosures were, yes, the size of a washing machine, and like a washing machine had to be properly set up or they would walk around the room when turned on. (Guess how I know this.) We had three of them and a total of seven data disk packs, as we were just small fry. An engineering disk pack, required to realign the read-write heads should we have to replace or even just move them for any reason, cost $25,000; we had one of those. (For those keeping count in the back, that's US$95,000 just for the disk packs...) If there was a head crash, we'd have to replace the disk pack and all 20 heads and realign with the engineering pack. In the years I was there we replaced three disk packs. That's $30,000, for a total of $125,000 on just the disk packs, plus another $30,000 for replacing the read-write heads.) We actually got about 250 MB storage on them, until they were replaced on a one-for-one basis, by then brand new 800 MB fixed drives, also from CDC and also listed in that PDF.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
