Every once in a while I’m overtaken by a bout of technology nostalgia. Although I’m not old enough to have any real experience with the ancient stuff I enjoy reading about it. (No punch cards for me. My first computer was an Apple ][e that my family bought when I was in junior high.) I was listening to the most recent version of TWiT when I heard about the recent 50th anniversary of the hard drive at the Computer History Museum. This really clicked with me because I’d just purchased a new 500-GB external hard drive for my PowerBook.

PC World has an article that describes that first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC 305. It weighed a ton (literally) and held 5 MB of data. The cost per MB of storage (inflation adjusted) was $70,000. Isn’t that amazing? The 500-GB drive I just purchased comes in at $0.00054/MB. In other words, storage in 1956 cost nearly 130,000,000× more than it does now.

Can you imagine what things will be like 10 years from now? According to the PC World article we can expect:

Wickersham outlines what he expects for 3.5-inch drives: “In 2005, for a three-platter drive, 500GB was standard. By 2009, that will be a 2TB drive. And if we continue for 2013, using Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology, we’ll have 8TB drives.” Wickersham throws out similar numbers for 1-inch drives: From a standard of 8GB in 2005, he expects we’ll see 30GB in 2009, and 100GB in 2013.

Inexpensive, nearly unlimited storage will change the way we think about information. Privacy concerns aside for the moment, consider what it would be like to have a complete digital archive of everything you’ve ever done on a thumbdrive in your pocket. Will we still be assessing students on their factual knowledge in 10 years? And how will we prepare our teachers for the change?