It’s incredible how much the prices have fallen and that’s how it should be. Sure, I bought the 960 close to launch but still the difference is staggering.
The 960 Evo still chugs along albeit it’s a new one because a few months after I bought it, I had to RMA it. I guess that’s what happens when you are an early adopter. I lost a few hours of work when the original 960 Evo decided to stop working but it also taught me to be more paranoia with backups.
My father went a bit nuts and bought our first family computer some time around '85. It was an 8088 Turbo XT with a 10MB hard drive. It was something like a $3,000 computer (which would be similar to $8,500 today, with inflation). That hard drive was so big, we thought we’d never fill it. The biggest game we had at the time, Star Flight took up two 360KB floppies, and both my brother and I could each have our own copies on the hard drive, without worrying about space. It was amazing.
But, tech moves on and what was once “bleeding edge” becomes old hat. I’m pretty sure there are calculators which can emulate that entire 8088. And, 10MB is a rounding error on modern drives. I also have little doubt that, 40 years from now we’ll look back at 1TB hard drives and think “oh, how quaint”.