History of computer disk prices 1956-2016

Introduction

This presentation is a part of the course project assignment for the Coursera Developing Data Products class. The peer assessed assignment has two parts. The first part is to create a Shiny application and deploy it on RStudio servers. Next, a reproducible pitch presentation about the application has to be made with Slidify or RStudio Presenter. This presentation adresses the second part of the course project.

The application developed for the first part of the assignment is avalilable at:

https://kurowska.shinyapps.io/disk_prices

The source code for ui.R and server.R files are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/kurowska/disk_prices/

Prediction: "The cost for 128 kilobytes of memory will fall below U$100 in the near future." (Creative Computing magazine, December 1981, page 6)

"At $100 for 128 kilobytes, the price of 256 megabytes comes to $200,000."

"Make it bigger, faster, cheaper. "

— Al Shugart Chairman and CEO of Seagate Technology Inc. (originally Shugart Technology Inc.)

The cost of hard drives, used in computers for storing data in large quantities, has been falling rapidly for many years.

Shiny application

My application uses data gathered from the following sources:

• mkomo.com
• jcmit.com

I have processed the data and used it to show how storage prices changed over the years (1956 - 2017). The user may toggle various kinds of drives and fits that show general trend for prices per GB of storage.

An example screen shot from the application: