Does Vista Actually Want 18 Gigabytes Of Disc Space?
Moore's Law.
Dale
"HEMI-Powered" wrote in message
...
Today, Ken Blake, MVP made these interesting comments ...
Keith Schaefer wrote:
It's a rather large OS, but nothing really to worry about in
this day and age of 500gb drives....
Right! The way I always think it should be looked at is not in
terms of megabytes or gigabytes, but in terms of the dollar
cost (substitute your own local currency, if necessary) of
providing hard disk space for the operating system.
My first hard drive, about 20 years ago, was 20MB, and cost
$200. DOS used about 1MB, or $20 worth, of that drive.
Today, one can readily buy a 250GB drive for less than half of
that, $90 or so. That makes the cost of 18GB around $6.50. And
that's without even considering that 20-year old dollars were
worth much more than today's dollars. The cost of providing
space for the operating system has gone down substantially and
continues to go down substantially all the time.
Modern versions of Windows do much more and do it much more
easily than 20-year-old versions of DOS. I think it's
wonderful that we can get so much more capability while still
spending much less for the disk space needed for it.
It's hard for me to understand someone's getting upset about
an operating system's using $6.50 worth of disk space.
Ken, I forget the fellow's name, but I imagine you would know,
but the one who predicted 20-30 years ago that computers would
double in performance every couple of years but be half as
expensive. What I think most users have seen, though, is that
increasingly bigger O/S's and apps, to support today's needs and
desire for GUI vs. command line stuff, and the changeover from
hardware being the big expense to the big money going for
programmers and marketing staff, whatever the hardware folks are
able to build gets chewed up within one cycle on O/S and apps, so
that today's 500 gig was yesteryear's 50 gigs and before that, it
was 150KB floppies. My first Apple II in 1978 cost me $400 for
just 48KB of memory, and the first floppy drives were $500 and
disks about 5 bucks apiece. But, an enormous amount of work could
be done with them, IF the user also wanted to be a programmer and
system support person.
I also remember the first IBM PX XTs we got at work with just 10
MEG HDs, and people thought those were the cat's meow! But, you
are right in that internal and even portable external HD space is
so cheap/gig that it is wiping out the optical market for
everythng except what people want to play in their cars or on TV.
Much easier to just buy another 200 gig external, plug it into
your USB port, dump your excess and backups, store it, and move
on.
--
HP, aka Jerry
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