So... my first hard drive was a Seagate ST-212, a stepper motor (not voice coil) based 10MB drive in a full sized half-height form factor. In 1983, it cost about 700 or so. som quick math gets use a cost per TB of an inflation adjusted, present value of money price of $228,000,000.00!

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I just added an array of 5 18TB drives for which I paid $320 each, or just under $18.00 per TB. I paid about $1600 for about 50TB of RAID6 storage. At the 1983 price, I would have had to pay $20.5B!

RAM is similar. I paid about $200.00 for 1MB of DIP RAM in 1983, adjusted value per GB would be $650,000! Current prices, about $5.00/GB.

 

I just added an array of 5 18TB drives for which I paid $320 each, or just under $18.00 per TB. I paid about $1600 for about 50TB of RAID6 storage. At the 1983 price, I would have had to pay $20.5B!

If you had just waited another 43 years, you could have gotten that 50TB for well less than a penny.

 

My first hard drive in 1986+/- was 5Mb and cost a month's wages. It was the size of a lunch box. I thought there was no way to fill it. Now I have word files that big.

 

In 2020, for an intro class I was teaching at the Academy, I looked up costs for CPUs, RAM, and hard disks to show the explosive growth in both capability and affordability.

Here are some of the slides from the resulting PowerPoint deck.





The "home" in that last slide was the house I grew up in. The point that the three-bedroom house that I lived in would have only bought enough hard-drive space to store 13 minutes of video got their attention.

 

My first hard drive in 1986+/- was 5Mb and cost a month's wages. It was the size of a lunch box. I thought there was no way to fill it. Now I have word files that big.

There are greeting cards with more storage than that!

 

The first gas price I remember is from about 1968, 25¢ per gallon... bringing that forward, it is about $2.30 a gallon. Gas isn't really that different than it was...

On the other hand, Tony sold a slice of pizza—real NY style big pie—for 10¢, and the price was so stable he had a neon sign for the price.When I returned to the neighborhood about 5 years later, he had taped a paper plate over it with 15¢ a slice written on it over the dime a pop one.

 

There are greeting cards with more storage than that!

My first computer, in 1984, was a TI Pro. It cost $5k (this included quite a bit of software and I don't recall what the split was). I maxed out the RAM at 768 KB. But a 10 MB hard drive for it would have added $1500, so I lived with the two 360 KB floppy drives.

 

The first gas price I remember is from about 1968, 25¢ per gallon... bringing that forward, it is about $2.30 a gallon. Gas isn't really that different than it was...

On the other hand, Tony sold a slice of pizza—real NY style big pie—for 10¢, and the price was so stable he had a neon sign for the price.When I returned to the neighborhood about 5 years later, he had taped a paper plate over it with 15¢ a slice written on it over the dime a pop one.

Oil companies, who are constantly being accused of price fixing and jacking up prices artificially, have historically done a lousy job of even keeping up with inflation, despite significant increases in the difficulty of developing fields and regulatory and environmental burdens (not of which I'm arguing against, but they have added significant overhead costs to production).

I just bought gas a couple days ago for $1.57/gal. In 1983, when I first started college, I was paying $1.18/gal.

 

I just bought gas a couple days ago for $1.57/gal.

And 25% of that was tax.

 

And 25% of that was tax.

More than that. The total federal/state tax is $0.474/gallon, which is almost exactly 30%. But it was barely 10% when we hit $4.34/gal some time back.

I don't have a huge problem with fuel taxes provided they are used for the purposes of at least maintaining transportation infrastructure. Leaving the EV issue aside (which some places are starting to address), charging a per-gallon tax is a reasonably decent proxy for the amount of damage done by a vehicle. It's far from perfect, but it's also far less intrusive on the privacy of drivers than would be the case of tracking the miles driven by each car. Plus, it ensures that out-of-state travelers and tourists renting vehicles pay a proportionate amount. The question of whether the amount collected is properly used or the proper amount is a completely different issue.

In fairness, the federal gas tax was last adjusted in 1993 when it went from 14.1 cents/gal to the current 18.4 cents/gal. I don't have a problem with tax revenues tracking inflation; what I objected to at the time was that NONE of that increase went to maintaining roads, despite there being growing concerns regarding aging infrastructure as well as increasing instances of things like bridge failures. Instead, it all went to deficit reduction (i.e., was put into the general fund). This was, at least, fixed in 1997.

 

More than that. The total federal/state tax is $0.474/gallon, which is almost exactly 30%. But it was barely 10% when we hit $4.34/gal some time back.

I don't have a huge problem with fuel taxes provided they are used for the purposes of at least maintaining transportation infrastructure. Leaving the EV issue aside (which some places are starting to address), charging a per-gallon tax is a reasonably decent proxy for the amount of damage done by a vehicle. It's far from perfect, but it's also far less intrusive on the privacy of drivers than would be the case of tracking the miles driven by each car. Plus, it ensures that out-of-state travelers and tourists renting vehicles pay a proportionate amount. The question of whether the amount collected is properly used or the proper amount is a completely different issue.

In fairness, the federal gas tax was last adjusted in 1993 when it went from 14.1 cents/gal to the current 18.4 cents/gal. I don't have a problem with tax revenues tracking inflation; what I objected to at the time was that NONE of that increase went to maintaining roads, despite there being growing concerns regarding aging infrastructure as well as increasing instances of things like bridge failures. Instead, it all went to deficit reduction (i.e., was put into the general fund). This was, at least, fixed in 1997.

For the record, I wasn't complaining about gas taxes, per se. I was (very) indirectly pointing out that the government makes far more "profit" on a gallon of gas than the evil greedy oil companies do.

 

For the record, I wasn't complaining about gas taxes, per se. I was (very) indirectly pointing out that the government makes far more "profit" on a gallon of gas than the evil greedy oil companies do.

Now that I agree with. It's hard to pin down a number exactly because there are so many players involved with lots of different levels of integration, but I believe that only about 5 to 10 cents of the price of a gallon of gas is accounted for by oil company profits (which generally see overall profit margins of 10%, give or take). Gasoline is generally one of the lowest margins at only about 2% (because it is so fiercely competitive at the retail level). Diesel and aviation fuel is about twice that at something like 5%. Plastics start from there and go up to about twice that (6% to 12% type numbers). The latter is likely reflective of the fact that plastics are much more varied and specialized, so there is far less competition among suppliers of specific types.

 

What gets me is you can buy a lamp off of Amazon for $30 which lasts for a few years, while dinner for two in a single night lands you a bill that could easily exceed twice that. (Heck, the bottle of olive oil I bought last week cost as much as that lamp!) It isn't the farmers that are gouging us either. It's the companies that process and package it. Do food prices really need to be that high in order to make a decent profit?

 

I was unable to wrap my head around the idea long ago when chips got up to over a million transistors. Now I just shrug my shoulders and say to myself "Gee, I wonder what they will do next"? It is far better to not even try to comprehend the enormity of it. I saw something today with an expert talking about being able to count the number of seconds that have elapsed since the universe was created. Uhuh, nope, not even going to try...