…when it makes sense. The rational direction of movement in technology, in my curmudgeonly opinion, is toward less obtrusiveness.
Example:
Some three years ago, I sort-of inherited this old hard drive of Landlady’s. It can hold 500 gigabytes of files.
(Say it with me! 500 Gigabytes! If that seems like a lot, you might be old.)
I have no idea what it originally cost, but it was priceless to me because other than a few shelves of DVDs I’ve seen a brazillion times each, this hard drive was my principal source of moving pictures. I’ve got bootleg TV shows and movies like you wouldn’t believe, ferried into the hinterlands at irregular intervals by person or persons unnamed.
All good things got to come to an end. The hand-me-down hard drive started click-of-deathing and refusing to open at all, at irregular intervals. If I wanted to save all those immense files, I needed to move.
So with a tear in my eye I did something I rarely do: I spent my own money on Amazon…
…for this. Fifty bucks. For a terabyte of storage, in a package so slim it takes up zero real estate on the desk because it slides right into one of the cubbies in my rolltop. No power cord, no transformer brick. Compatible with Linux Mint which means it’s compatible with anything, just plug it in. Fifty bucks. And like my contemptible yet amazing Tracfone, by no means anything remotely like state of the art.
I proclaim myself gobsmacked.
My first brand-new hard drive was bought at Frye’s, on an after Christmas clearance sale.
For the princely sum of TWO HUNDRED dollars, I received a brand spanking new Western Digital hard disk with an absolutely immense 1.6 GB of storage!
This would have been about 1996/1997,,,,,,,,,,,
I once designed an interface to the Ibis disk drive, which were normally used at the time on Cray-1 supercomputers. It was the size of a middling refrigerator, and had the unheard-of performance of 10Mbyte/second transfer rates. 1.2 gigabytes of storage!
Even earlier my second computer was a Zenith Z-180(?) laptop. It had two 720k floppies and no hard drive. I actually ran my business on the thing.
It’s a good thing those new terabyte drives have a USB-3.0 interface, since it would take a silly amount of time to back up over a USB-2.0 interface. But yeah, what’s not to like?
I was looking at the wikipedia article about Cray 1, and found this interesting statement:
“The 80 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer…. As a comparison standpoint, the processor in a typical 2013 smartphone performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS.”
Uh, yeah. Funny you mention that, Paul. The four hours I spent transferring files from one drive to the other made me think about that myself. All afternoon.
I’ll just throw this over the transom…
https://www.reddit.com/r/fullmoviesonyoutube
You make Uncle Joel sad. 🙁
I can’t do streaming or torrent or anything that requires big blocks of data unless I want to offend Wildblue, the great and terrible. I get 750 meg per month, period. Parsimonious crackers.
Wildblue is the only way you can get internet? There aren’t any fixed wireless service providers where you live?