Direct Access Storage in 1983 vs 2013
I went back to re-read my master’s thesis from nearly thirty years ago. The basic conclusion that there can be actual diseconomies of scale, as opposed to economies of scale, from centralized control of computing assets has not changed. But the the base numbers are crazy different. My statistics showed that the U.S. Marine Corps had less than 100 Gigabytes of Direct Access Storage spread across 6 different mainframe computer sites in 1983. I bought 6 terabytes for my home last weekend for about $300 dollars. Times have changed. You can find my thesis here.
