The result has been spectacular, as illustrated in figure 2.4: over the past six decades, computer memory has gotten half as expensive roughly every couple of years. Hard drives have gotten over 100 million times cheaper, and the faster memories useful for computation rather than mere storage have become a whopping 10 trillion times cheaper. If you could get such a “99.99999999999% off” discount on all your shopping, you could buy all real estate in New York City for about 10 cents and all the gold that’s ever been mined for around a dollar.
