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Now you could argue that there’s less space on a modern drive, given how file sizes increased. Even 5MB was massive then, with mostly text files. I still recall when I had to upgrade from MS Word 4.x/Mac, which did still fit on a single floppy (together with a basic OS), to MS Word 5.x/Mac, which was more then 5MB, on an MPB 100 with a 20MB disk: I had to dump half of the installed applications most of the data in order for Word to fit. Soon, HDs increased to 10 times the size to keep up with this, but soon enough, 220MB was less than that 20MB had been before. Same with GB-drives, and so on. If you want to transpile a simple text file of a few lines into another simple text file, you may need an entire drive for dependencies… To my own observations, drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them. But, at the same time, requirements for temporary storage are steadily increasing, which may provide you with even less usable space. As for price, yes, economies of scale. If you’re selling billions and billions of drives, you may do things that were unthinkable, when the total number of sales was still in the 100Ks, at a fraction of the cost. |