Some documents will be aimed at paying audiences and some will be free to anyone who wants to pay attention. Digital storage is fantastically inexpensive. Hard-disk drives in personal computers will soon cost about 15 cents per megabyte (million bytes) of information. To put this in perspective 1 megabyte will hold about 700 pages of text, so the cost is something like $0.00021 per page – about one two-hundredth what the local copy center would charge at 5 cents a page. And because there is the option of reusing the storage space for something else, the cost is actually the cost of storage per unit time – in other words, of renting space. If we assume just a three-year average lifetime for the hard-drive disk, the amortized price per page per year is $0.00007. And storage is getting cheaper all the time. Hard-disk prices have been dropping by about 50 percent per year for the last several years.
Predictor: Gates, Bill
Prediction, in context:In his 1995 book “The Road Ahead,” Microsoft CEO Bill Gates writes:”Millions of people and companies will be creating documents and publishing them on the network. Some documents will be aimed at paying audiences and some will be free to anyone who wants to pay attention. Digital storage is fantastically inexpensive. Hard-disk drives in personal computers will soon cost about 15 cents per megabyte (million bytes) of information. To put this in perspective 1 megabyte will hold about 700 pages of text, so the cost is something like $0.00021 per page – about one two-hundredth what the local copy center would charge at 5 cents a page. And because there is the option of reusing the storage space for something else, the cost is actually the cost of storage per unit time – in other words, of renting space. If we assume just a three-year average lifetime for the hard-drive disk, the amortized price per page per year is $0.00007. And storage is getting cheaper all the time. Hard-disk prices have been dropping by about 50 percent per year for the last several years.”
Biography:Bill Gates, the most influential technology entrepreneur of the late 20th century, was the primary author of the prediction-packed 1995 book “The Road Ahead” and is the founder and CEO of Microsoft Corporation. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: The Road Ahead (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 6: The Content Revolution
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Page 119
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne