[sliverstorm]

Silicon is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and for a very simple reason. While we have many advanced possibilities with germanium or carbon nano-tubes or other such advanced processes, silicon is still the cheapest by such a magnitude that it wins out in performance per dollar.

[nnnnni]

Blank CDs were pretty expensive at one point.

[sliverstorm]

I'm not saying it will always be that way, but rather there is a large gap so, barring incredible breakthroughs, silicon's got at least a decade or so left.

Why couldn't we have incredible breakthroughs tomorrow? Well, we could, but they've been working on non-silicon tech for at least thirty years now- and we are still using silicon.

[mjwalshe]

I remember (early 80's) when a box of 10 HP floppy disks was £100

[huxley]

I remember (mid-80s) when my extremely noisy 20MB SCSI hard drive cost me just under $1000.