I know this isn’t anything new. I’ve grown used to catching up, if that, and constantly marveling at things every teenager has known forever. but…
I’m holding two terabytes worth of data storage on the fingertips of my left hand.
The first hard drive I ever saw was also a Seagate, by coincidence. It stored 20 megabytes, needed its own power supply, and was owned by a major corporation. That was hot stuff, 30 years ago. This is a million times more capacious, far smaller, is powered with the trivial amperage available through its own data transfer cable, and was somebody else’s cast-off.
Sometimes it just hits me, is all.
The first ONE Gigabyte hard drive I ever saw cost $1000.00. I was shocked at both the amazing capacity of the drive (for that time), and that somebody would actually pay that much for a drive. Now you can buy a one gig flash drive for under $5.00 (When you can find one that small to buy.)
The first hard drive I dealt with was 10MB, and was the size of a small washing machine. A dot-gov machine. Shortly after, I owned a 20MB HD the size of a hardback book. Now, my 64 GIGABYTE thumb drives are last year’s news.
(I used to teach programming on a serious engineering work station with 32K of memory and paper tape perm storage. But then, I remember bakelite phones rented every month from Ma Bell. With screw post connections.)
Bear Wrote: “I remember bakelite phones rented every month from Ma Bell. With screw post connections”
I keep one of those ancient phones here in the house to remind me of those days. That’s a perfect example of what happens when you let a corporation get too big and too cozy with the government. If AT&T had their way, we would still be renting those clunky phones, and they would still be “protecting their network” by not allowing you to own your own phone. That clunky phone that remained in your home for decades and served as a constant drain on your bank account is what happens when innovation is stifled. If AT&T had been allowed to continue their hold on communications, it’s a sure thing that there would be no Internet and therefore no TUAK, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Also, there wouldn’t be a cell phone on your belt. At best, you might have a big clunky, expensive mobile phone in your car.
And it’s not just phones! Back then IBM, NCR and a very few other big corporation owned most mainframes and leased them out. That’s a business model that they aimed to keep!
On the other hand, that cheap 64 Gig thumb drive in your pocket is what happens when innovation is allowed to flourish in a truly open marketplace.
A guy I used to work with sold mainframes for IBM in a former life. His last sale was 1 megabyte hard drive. It cost $1 million.
One Terabyte thumb drives can be had for about 20 bucks if you hit the right sale
The Navy’s VAST avionics test system was made of “building blocks” each 3 feet wide, 7′ high, and 4′ deep. One such BB was the computer; I think it had 56k memory, but that was 25 years ago, & I’m not sure I have that much memory nowadays.
This does not include the drive or the display/keyboard section–that’s 2 other BBs.
The first hard drive I saw was in a garage sale for $25, and I bought it. I later learned it was a custom-made, nitrogen-filled, high-speed wonderbox made by HP for a military application. It was the size of a large garbage can, and held an incredible 750,000 bytes that could be accessed at the blinding speed of a dialup modem.
I moved on then to something I could actually use, a $5,000 hard drive for my Victor 9000 IBM-clone machine. I believe it held five megabytes. Which was bloody dang well huge, you know.
Marko was showing me a gaming laptop he’d upgraded by tossing the HDD and replacing it with a half-Terabyte solid state drive. “When you think about it, having to fetch your data by spinning rusty magnetized discs around with a motor is really kind of primitive…”
Well, gosh, when you put it like that.. o.O
Tam, the way thumb drives get bigger and cheaper every year I wonder if anybody’ll be able to give a motorized hard drive away in the near future.
Appropriate to your title:
The Black Hole in Los Alamos, NM.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit this place a number of times over some years – an amazing inventory!
A bit of trivia to go along with that – always tickled me…
The guy who built that place also had a habit of bringing his own proclamation down to the doors of the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe and nailing them up every Oct. 31st. He didn’t seem to approach it as a publicity hound – just something he was moved to do…
I had a chance to read the proclamation (same every year – AFAIK) a long time ago and can’t recall a bit of it except that I lost interest about 1/3 page in. ‘E’ for effort though!