STORAGE WARS

Why did our PCs’ disk drive capacities stall?

- Phil Iwaniuk

A young(er) Bill Gates said, “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” about the IBM PC’s memory back in 1981 while onstage at a computer conference. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. Firstly, it’s impossible to imagine the Microsoft cofounder as truly young. Some people seem to be born aged about 48, and Gates is among them. Secondly, nobody seems to remember precisely which computer conference this took place at, or the precise quote. In fact Gates himself now claims he never said it.

But let's not let the truth get in the way of a good maxim, and that's how the pace of change quickly makes boasting about specs sound foolish. 640KB of information, as we know now, was not enough for anybody. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Moore's Law held firm, and as computing equipment made its way from foreboding beige laboratories to the home, its specs and capabilities escalated dramatically. By the time Windows 95 arrived, users needed an astronomical 4MB of system RAM to run it, and upwards of 55MB of hard disk space.

And we all know what happened from there. Between 1995 and 2015, the componentry inside our precious home computers became dramatically more powerful each time manufacturers iterated a new generation. Numbers that would have seemed like pure sci-fi quickly became affordable and attainable hardware specs: 1GHz of processing power. A terabyte of storage.

READ/WRITE, REPEAT