1

Damn kids and their new-fangled technologies.   I was perfectly happy with my slide rule!  Happy, I tell you!

(Ok, not really... by the time I reached high school, Texas Instruments had taken over the world with cheap LED calculators running on 9-volt batteries.  The sample slide rule hanging in front of our science classroom was never touched by the teacher.)

2
I was shocked to see 8GB of RAM going for $20 - $30. That amount of memory was almost inconceivable 20 years ago when I was paying a couple hundred bucks for a couple of megs.

3 Actually, my phone has more compute power and memory than existed in 1960, and the display is better than anything that existed even in 1980.

4 I just bought two 128GB USB sticks - tiny things that fit mostly inside the USB port - and an 8TB disk drive.  Even with the weak Australian dollar they were amazingly cheap; combined they were half the price of my first 40MB hard disk back around 1988.

5 Oh, and while I was placing the order I threw in a 1200dpi 18ppm networked Postscript colour laser printer as an afterthought.  (This one.  The Australian price is even better, worked out to about US $99.)

6 I've told this story before, but this is as good a time as any to trot it out again.  I worked for Cowputers, in one of their stand-alone stores, for a year (until they closed all their stores, in fact).  This would have been 2003 when I started. 

At that time, they gave every employee a flash drive for demonstration purposes.  We were expected to put pictures, music, whatever, on them to wow the customer, y'know?  At the time, the drives were $39.99... for 16mb.  Yes, megabytes.

We sold 128mb flash drives for $99.99... and that was competitive.

7

I still remember the time when I got my IOmega Zip Drive (Remember those?), which cost $100+...And the Zip disk sold for the bargain basement price of $30 for a two disk pack.  Note that each disk held 100MB.  I was giddy about getting it and ran through a lot of disks storing all the files I no longer had to delete.

What amuses me is while computers have gotten so much more powerful, compact, and cheap than their predecessors, the current graphing calculators used by students do not appear to have made anywhere near the advancements over a top of the line graphing calculator from 20 years ago.  You have the USB ports, some of color LED screens, many now can do functions from multiple subjects - but the price is within the ballpark of what they cost 20 years ago and a cheap Android smart phone could easily do more with proper apps and a memory card.

8 Reaching back a decade, I remember my first digital camera coming with an 8MB SD card.  I remember being able to upgrade my 386 to 2MB of RAM, and getting a 1MB graphics card.

But best of all, I remember getting my Tandy 1000SX upgraded from 256K to 640K of RAM.  I think the upgrade cost $400.  But a 640K machine could run ANYTHING.

9

I had forgotten about the old 8MB at 16MB flash drives!  Yeah, it's weird to think about paying that much for that little.

We had the Zip drives in the computer labs at college, and you bought one to keep a large archive of your files.

cxt, I don't know what this "student" thing for graphing calculators is--I use mine a lot, to include earlier today and most of yesterday morning.  I'd stab someone before I gave it up for a smartphone app, because of the soft keyboard on current phones.  It's so much faster and more accurate with an actual keyboard.

10

I don't know what this "student" thing for graphing calculators is--I use mine a lot, to include earlier today and most of yesterday morning

That is obvious a 'your mileage my vary' issue.  I still have my trusty graphing calculator, but I never use it (As oppose to the cheap and simple calculator.) because I never need to.  Though I have written out long division on paper because I found it easier then fiddling around with my phone sometimes...

The keyboard interface is a major advantage that graphing calculators - and any device that uses one, like a laptop - have over a tablet or smart phone.  I especially loathe the keyboard used by IPods/IPhones, which obviously were programmed to be used by a child Edward Scissorhands.

11 USB sticks seem like a pretty good way to go.  Right now I'm storing everything on a USB RAID box, but that's getting close to full. 

12

I've got a RAID NAS, and it says one of its drives has already failed. I had a Windows Home Server NAS, and Windows Update killed it one time.

So for the time being I'm rolling things off my desktop onto the RAID NAS and also copying to USB flash drives, for redundancy.