When I was preparing to go to college back in 1987 my father bought me a computer that lacked a hard drive. That's right kids, we loaded our programs with 5.25 inch floppies back then.

But it was a pain. So, with a little cajoling (and throwing in my some of my own money) I got my Dad to purchase a 40 megabyte hard drive for $400.

That, of course, was all the space in the world. My OS was an early DOS - 2-point-something - that took up two or three floppies. My biggest program was WordPerfect 5.1. After loading everything I had like 35 megabytes left. I was set for life, man! To give you an idea of how much space that was - the Bible is about 4 megabytes. There was no way I would fill that hard drive even after four years of undergrad typing.

Fast forward to yesterday when I bought a contemporary hard drive - 2 Terabytes - for $230. That's 2,097,152 megabytes (2 x 1024 gb x 1024 mb). The price per megabyte of storage has dropped from $10 per megabyte ($400/40 mb) to $.000109 per megabyte ($230/2097152 mb) in 22 years. That's 91,743 times cheaper. At that rate, if you could still find a 40 megabyte hard drive for sale, a penny would buy you two and they'd owe you change.

Thinking back its clear why we didn't have electronic books when I was in college. Sure we didn't have electronic paper technology and those screens were hard to read. Computers were bulky. But there was also the price for storage. That 4 gigabyte Bible would have occupied $40 worth of storage. A paper book was better in every way - except for searching. Now storage costs are miniscule (2 Terabytes would hold 524,288 Bible-sized books), computers are tiny, and we have electronic paper. So finally, after many false starts, we are getting eBooks.

Of course I'm not going to be using this hard drive for books or text of any kind. As hard drives have increased in size the nature of what we do with them has changed. In the 90's we started storing music and pictures. Now its video.

An uncompressed commercial DVD stores about 8 gigabytes of data. That means I'll be able to back up about 250 DVD's. This is solving a major problem in my house. Little kids are rough on DVD's. I'll be able to back up my entire DVD library so that their lovable, grubby mits never touch a DVD. They'll select the movie they want to watch with the device shown above, and launch it.

Things are getting better all the time.