Whats brought Silicon Valley into the picture?
Email Bruce Sterling at bruces@well.com. VIEW delong: on the wired economy Shifting Into Overdrive What happens when mass storage leaves microchips in the dust. By J. Bradford DeLong Those of us with one foot far enough in the grave to have been using computers in the mid-1980s remember our extraordinary liberation from the floppy disk. We were freed from the requirement that all our programs and operating systems and files come in 360-kilobyte, 5½-inch chunks. It was a marvelous advance, the revolution in hard disk technology that gave us 10-megabyte mass storage devices for $1,000. Scott Menchin But it is the advances since then – and those we can firmly see our future promising – that are even more marvelous. Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and “back then” = 18 years ago. I’m sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth o
