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While reading a computing book from the early 1980s the other day I came across this passage:
"System capacities inexplicably diminish over time. The double-density disk drives that once were the answer to my storage prayers no longer fill the bill. The double-sided, double-density drives I'll get next will seem like a vast frontier — for a while. I've heard guys with 10-megabyte hard disks complain of feeling cramped."
Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie (Spectrum Books, 1984)
I remember my first (borrowed) PC, an 8086 IBM PC with a 20MB hard drive that at the time seemed pretty huge. These days even 20GB would probably be considered rather small, and you'd probably struggle to install a reasonably complete modern Linux system (which is a fair bit smaller than Windows) in less than 2GB. As for floppy disks — double-sided, double-density or otherwise— they are pretty much a thing of the past by now.
It's quite scary how fast computer technology develops, so that yesterday's bleeding edge kit becomes today's obsolescent dinosaur and technology which initially seems to offer more capabilities than you could ask or imagine soon becomes frustratingly limited. Of course, this behaviour fits Moore's Law (read the linked Wikipedia article if you want to find out about that).
One downside of this is that old computer equipment (which could mean things only 2 or 3 years old, and certainly any computer more than 10 years old) may still function perfectly well but be effectively useless, at least for everyday computing, because it lacks the capability to run the modern software we want to use on it or it runs so slowly compared to the newer machines we've become used to.
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