The Cost and Speed of Computing and Communications 1956-2019

The Economist

The price of computation today is roughly one hundred-millionth what it was in the 1970s, when the first microprocessors became commercially available (see chart). According to figures collected by John McCallum, a computer scientist, a megabyte of data storage in 1956 would have cost around $9,200 ($85,000 in today’s prices). It now costs just $0.00002.