Trying to finish off a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger. Good but I wish it were a long essay rather than a book (ohmygawd, I’m suffering from DIG – Digital Instant Gratification).

Stat from the book (p63).

In 1957, IBM introduced the 305, a computer with magnetic disks as storage devices that offered up to 5 megabytes of space, and which was valued at around $1 million (in 2006 terms). The cost of the storage unit alone ran to about $70,000 per megabyte in the 1950s; by 1980 that price had come down to below $500 (all in 2006 dollars), less than one percent of what it had been just two-and-a-half decades earlier. Twenty years later, in 2000, storage cost had plummeted to about 1 cent, 1/50,000th of what it was in 1980. And in 2008, the cost of storage for one megabyte of information had been reduced to 1/100th of a cent.

So here’s a question. What happens to information when there is almost no cost to  store it?