The Unofficial Apple Weblog took this photo of a 1985 hard drive at Macworld: $40,000 for 40MB, and... big:
(Admittedly, this has been exaggerated for promotional effect. The Mac II, introduced in 1987, only cost $5500 with a 40MB hard drive included. But still, we've come a long way.)
Follow the storage performance/size/capacity/price trendline out 10 or 15 years, and we get to the hard-drive that John Gilmore's been describing: the size of a sugar-cube, costing $1-2, powered off of the occassional hard shake, and capacious enough to store every word ever uttered, every song ever sung, every painting ever painted, every movie ever shot, and every word ever written, at a resolution that can be magnified into the microscale without distortion.
My prediction is that even then, we'll still complain about running out of disk space, and we'll still be too lazy to do backups properly.
