Remember 2003? George W. Bush sat in the White House, the San Antonio Spurs were storming through the NBA Finals, our young men and women in uniform were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and new albums by Linkin Park and R. Kelly captured the ears of a nation. Yes, 2003 was pretty much exactly the same as 2007.

Except when it came to portable memory. See, in 2003 Hitachi announced their new 4GB Microdrive to great fanfare, throwing around terms like “breakthrough” and “significantly lower cost-per-megabyte”. Four whole gigs of portable storage on a tiny little hard drive that fits pretty much any Type II card slot? It seemed like a miracle, even at the suggested retail price of $499. The 4GB Microdrive was even used in the original iPod Mini (the aluminum skinned multicolored ones). Certainly, the future was unlimited for the Hitachi 4GB Microdrive.

Not!

Quicker than you could say “solid-state memory revolution”, smaller, cheaper, better alternatives came along. Plus, later generations of Microdrives offered even more storage space, microdriving the 4GB Microdrive toward obsolescence. Now, just four short years later, they’re a figurative dime a dozen (two for twenty bucks in literal currency), a miracle of a different kind. Sure, your device needs the right kind of slot to use it, and the Microdrive uses a lot of power. Still, you’ll get 8GB of portable storage for just $2.50 per GB before shipping - “significantly lower cost-per-megabyte” indeed. 2003 may not have seemed so great at the time, but at 2007 prices, it looks like a very good year.

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