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| Fastrand II |
I entered the computer industry just over 50 years ago, and a purchase I have just made really brings home the scale of change over the years.
In 1966 my employer, Shell Mex and BP, was planning to move from a batch processing Leo 3 system involving the files of some 250,000 customers to a new computer which had direct access storage. In 1967 placed an order for a Univac Computer with FastRand drum drives. Each drive could store 100 megabytes of data and cost about £100,000. It came in a large cabinet and weighed about 2,200 kilo.
This weekend I decided to reorganise all my computer files as part of a move from Windows XP on a rather tired desktop to a laptop under Windows 10. These files include historical archives going back some 25 years, and urgently need restructuring. I purchased a drive big enough to hold all my personal files from several generations of personal computers and separate hard drives. The drive cost about 30,000 times less than a Fastrand (adjusted for rise in cost of living), weights about 100,000 times less, and can contain about 20,000 times more data!
Yes, everything of that kind of thing has gotten much cheaper and much better. I bought my first digital camera about 10 years ago - 3 MB and 3 power zoom for about $700.00 CDN. Memory cards then cost about $1.00 per MB. Now they cost about 50 cents per GB, 1/2000 as much.
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