My Own Experience with Moore's Law
June 18, 2004
I bought a new hard drive yesterday for one of my desktop machines—a 100 Gigabyte drive for 100 dollars. It made me harken back to one of my biggest early computer purchases in 1987, when I bought a hard drive for my Macintosh Plus computer. I had been been growing tired of swapping floppies in and out of my dual floppy drives. If I remember correctly, the first floppy disk held the operating system and the second floppy disk would hold the application, such as Microsoft Word. So if you were creating a document, you would swap the application disk in and out for a data disk when you needed to load a new document or save the one you were working on.
I was frugal enough then that I really thought long and hard about buying a hard drive. They were expensive, and in the Macintosh world, it meant choosing from a long and dizzying list of hard drive manufacturers. I finally settled on a Jasmine 40 MB hard drive for $700.
The math is pretty amazing. My 1987 purchase worked out to $17.50 per Megabyte, and my 2004 purchase worked out to .09 cents per Megabyte. Check my math, but this is significantly faster than Moore’s Law.
Posted by Bill Trippe at June 18, 2004 9:20 PM
Comments
Hi John,
Thanks for your post. You're absolutely right about Moore's Law applying specifically to integrated circuits. I was taking some poetic (marketing?) license. If you happened to follow the link in the initial post, you will see Intel provides a PDF of Gordon Moore's original paper.
Bill
Posted by Bill Trippe at June 21, 2004 9:04 PMPost a comment
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The growth is incredible, and I look back fondly on the 80-meg drive I bought for $800 when I ran out of space for my BBS, but Moore's Law does not apply here. It applies only to integrated circuits -- processors. (Which do follow Moore's law pretty well.)
Posted by John Schofield at June 21, 2004 7:49 PM