My first 1G drive was £540.

It was put in a PC with a 120M drive that had cost about £120 second hand a few months to a year earlier. So paying 'only' 50p a megabyte didn't seem too bad. At the time anyway. And in 1986, someone paid about that for the 20M disk I used to work on.

My first sub-single speed CD-ROM – you may have heard me shout "how $%^&ing fast?!?" when must-have CD-ROM game The 7th Guest revealed the truth about what its sustained data rate really was about a year later – was £500.

As the paper version of the encyclopeadia was about £700 at the time, there's part of me that thinks it wasn't too bad a deal. But I wish the people who'd sold it to me had still been in business when I discovered they'd lied.

The replacement, a double speed Mitsumi bought to play 7th Guest on, was £120.

I wish I could remember when I paid £250 – second-hand! – for four 4M SIMMs and thought I'd got a bargain.

I can remember a 120k floppy disk drive should have cost me £150 in 1983.

Such has been the rate of progress since then that my new P4/2G PC costs less than the keyboard and mono text only graphics card of the original IBM PC.