Data in the Mad Men Era

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you’ll be aware that the Mad Men television series, chronicling a decade of contemporary US history between March 1960 and November 1970, has just concluded.

Rather than to speculate on the story lines of its respective characters we thought it would be interesting to contemplate the technology in an era when the annual price to attend MIT, including room and board, was $1,500.00 – today, it costs over $45,000.

As the series opened in 1960 the price per megabyte (MB) of storage was $3,600.00. In capturing an aspect of the intelligent infrastructure from that time Computerhistory.org, writes that:

“The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC´s PDP-1 sold for $120,000. One of 50 built, the average PDP-1 included with a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator. It´s large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!, for it. The SpaceWar! creators then used the game as a standard demonstration on all 50 computers.”

By the time Don Draper was meditating atop Big Sur, in 1970, advances in data storage cooled down considerably to $259.70/MB – a 92+% decrease in ten years. In what was a precursor to today’s supercomputers, ComputerHistory.org explained the advancement of intelligent infrastructure by 1970.

“Computer-to-computer communication expanded when the Department of Defense established four nodes on the ARPANET: the University of California Santa Barbara and UCLA, SRI International, and the University of Utah. Viewed as a comprehensive resource-sharing network, ARPANET´s designers set out with several goals: direct use of distributed hardware services; direct retrieval from remote, one-of-a-kind databases; and the sharing of software subroutines and packages not available on the users´ primary computer due to incompatibility of hardware or languages.”

Calculating the percentage decrease in cost for data storage between 1970 and today is -99.9999…etc., etc. While the consumer price index for most goods and services is up and to the right, the price for storage, remains one of the great values of our time. The true significance of what’s been gained over the last 50 years shouldn’t be left solely to mathematicians and economists any more than a Don Draper-inspired ad campaign should dictate where brand loyalties should lie.

As the series concluded, the closing scene left some contemplating the future so we felt this blog could do the same. Consider then this rough calculation…the entire series (92, 45 minute High Definition episodes) of Mad men is equal to approximately 1.38 TB. All that can be stored on one Wireless Plus Mobile Storage device – small enough for those who, like Don, prefer to travel lite!

2015-05-20T17:58:06+00:00

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