To go along with my previous entry, here’s an amusing photo I’ve had kicking around in my files for a while:
Why is this amusing, you may wonder? Because it demonstrates how far we’ve come just in my relatively short lifetime: According to the e-mail in which I received this photo, the big object being wheeled around by the guy in the bunny suit is a 1975-vintage hard disk good for only about 500 KB of data. By contrast, even the smallest capacity digital-camera memory stick on the market these days — which is physically smaller than a credit card, remember — stores roughly sixteen times as much data (8000 KB, or 8 MB).
In the interest of full disclosure, however, I’m not sure how accurate my information on that photo is. I tried to verify the 500 KB figure, but I encountered a lot of dispute over whether or not the photo is even real. One confident-sounding person claimed this hard disk came from an old IBM storage system that would’ve had a capacity of between 5.4 and 11.2 MB. Which would still make this monster only equivalent to one of those low-end modern memory sticks, for all of its size. That’s something, isn’t it?
Amazing. I can’t believe how quickly computers have changed in size and price.
Yep. It’s getting easier to believe in that plot device you see in so many old classic Star Trek episodes, the library computer that contains complete information on everything that’s ever happened…
Yeah, and it’ll be the size of an m&m.
Now you sound like Ray Kurzweil!
I thought this was a photo of an oompa-loompa starting the Wonkavision countdown.
Funny, many people in that discussion thread I linked to above (under the word “dispute”) said the same thing.
Creepy little oompa-loompas stealing our antiquated memory systems…