If you buy this, you'll be set for life...

"The 1980's: The introduction of the first small hard disk drives. The first 5.25-inch hard disk drives packed 5 to 10 MB of storage - the equivalent of 2,500 to 5,000 pages of double-spaced typed information - into a device the size of a small shoe box. At the time, a storage capacity of 10 MB was considered too large for a so-called "personal" computer. "

NOTE: The cost of this hard drive was $3,499! (for just the hard drive, not the computer itself)

To put this in prospective for the non-tech minded... at the time of this posting 14 out of the 19 desktop packages for sell on Bestbuy.com have in excess of 400 gigabytes. That's 40,000 times as much memory. 10 MB is equivalent to approximately 2.5 songs in mp3 format!



sources: http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/storage.html
http://vectronicsappleworld.com/appleii/timeline.html