At our recent Be Inspired event, I spoke about how things have changed in 25 years, this being our 25th anniversary.
I noted that in 1984 Bentley Systems bought a 10 megabyte disk drive for $2000. We found it in an ad in the back of Byte magazine, issued a purchase order, and received it in a few short weeks. At the time we were thrilled that in the size of a large toaster it could hold the equivalent of nearly 30 floppies (the alternative at the time.) Then, I mentioned that last week the disk drive in my wife's laptop computer (that she uses for recipes, email, and other important stuff) started failing. So I went on the internet to newegg.com and found that you can't buy a replacement 250 gigabyte drive anymore. Instead I had to buy a 500 gigabyte 2.5 inch drive (I swear if you dropped it, you'd lose it) for $89. I was disgusted that they wanted to charge me $16 for overnight shipping.
I then realized that if I had wanted to buy 500 gigabytes in 1984, it would have cost $100MM. But I bet they wouldn't have charged me shipping...
That prompted Buddy Cleveland to send me this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN0MpBQG3-E He's right - everything is incredible and nobody is happy!