I grew up alongside the personal computer. During my childhood, there was huge excitement over CD-ROM.
CD-ROM offered dramatically more storage than before. It let you purchase huge media archives and libraries, and store them on very inexpensive-to-produce media. We had a copy of Encarta on CD, and my dad had Dark Forces. I remember it seeming like an explosive change. Recently, I quantified it, and verified my feeling.
To investigate this, I made a table of every five years starting in 1985 and went in 5 year increments. I researched modem bandwidth (commonly called "speed"), internal storage size, and removable storage size that was common at each of these points. I couldn't find citations for all of these, but I have anecdotal experience - we had dial-up in 2000, and 512GB SD cards were not uncommon in 2020.
| Year | Speed Min (bps) | Speed Max (bps) | Internal Min (MB) | Internal Max (MB) | Removable Min (MB) | Removable Max (MB) | Removable Details | Modem Speed Citation | Storage Citation | Removable Citation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | 1200 | 2400 | 10 | 20 | 0.360 | 1.2 | 5.25” Floppy | here | here | here |
| 1990 | 2400 | 9600 | 40 | 80 | 1.44 | 1.44 | 3.5” Floppy | here | here | here |
| 1995 | 14400 | 28800 | 500 | 1000 | 650 | 650 | CD ROM | here | here | here |
| 2000 | 56000 | 56000 | 10000 | 20000 | 4700 | 4700 | DVD ROM | My life | here | here |
| 2005 | 1000000 | 2000000 | 80000 | 200000 | 8500 | 8500 | DL-DVD ROM | here | here | here |
| 2010 | 10000000 | 25000000 | 500000 | 1000000 | 25000 | 50000 | Blu-Ray | here | here | here |
| 2015 | 25000000 | 100000000 | 1000000 | 2000000 | 64000 | 128000 | SD Card | here | here | here |
| 2020 | 100000000 | 300000000 | 1000000 | 4000000 | 256000 | 512000 | SD Card | here | here | My life |
| 2025 | 300000000 | 500000000 | 2000000 | 8000000 | 512000 | 1024000 | SD Card | here | here | here |
It's interesting to see the exponential way that computers have improved in 40 years just by seeing how these values grow. I computed averages for each year to get a sense of what the modem bandwidth, internal storage, and removable storage was.
I wanted to compare the growth of all three, to assess my memory of CD-ROM. I computed and graphed the logarithm of those averages to show the relative differences. Look how huge the jump was for CD-ROM between 1990 and 1995 (the bottom burnt orange line).
CD-ROM is the most transformative step-change in storage or bandwidth since the introduction of the personal computer. In just a few years, we went from 1.44MB floppies to 650MB compact discs - a 450x increase. This led to a renaissance for educational and entertainment material. To draw a comparison to the modern day, this would be like getting ~345TB SD Cards or 2250TB internal disks by 2030.