Can any of my fellow nerds identify what that is in the picture to the right? If you guessed a computer’s hard drive you’re absolutely right! What makes it so amazing is that it was one of the “Original” hard drives from the birth of computers. It’s storage capacity was 500kb and one had to wear something like a space suit to handle it.
To put things in their proper perspective, it would take four of these monster drives just to accomodate one of the digi-pix my camera produces. If you were to try to put a MP3 on it, you might get about the first 20 seconds of the song before you ran out of space. My Cellphone has 100x the storage capacity of this drive. To get the same storage my desktop computer currently has, multiply that drive 500,000 times and then condense it into a box not much bigger than a deck of cards! Here is a breakdown for ya…
1024 bits= 1 byte
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1024 kilobytes= 1 megabyte
1024 megabytes= 1 gigabyte
1024 gigabytes= 1 terabyte
None of you probably give a rat’s-ass about this but I find it simply astounding how far we’ve come in just 20 years!
YOU are so right, MIKE! Technology has BOOMED! It really makes me wonder what our children and grand-children will get to witness. It is amazing the progress they have made in just 10 years…..what will we be able to do in 20 years? Tasha
I just Know, Mike, that our kids will one day look back on our time and say, “can you believe the ancient technology they thought was awesome back then?!” And we’ll be like, “kids today… back when I was in college, we had to use calculators for math classes… now they have some do-everything-doohickie” or some such. Or, they’ll say, “Can you believe how popular the X-Box was back in the 2000’s? There’ll be the X-Box-M or something. Technology definitely is our new direction of evolution.
Lee
I’m the old person in this bunch. I can remember the first “computer” with it’s tubes, magnetic tape, numatic (sp)lines and punch cards. It didn’t have the capicity of an average calculator. It was as big as a football field and had to be air-conditioned. I can remember my Father saying that computers were just toys and wouldn’t ever amount to much. This wasn’t the only thing he was ever wrong about! 🙂
I wasn’t gonna mention anything Phyllis… but since you’ve admitted your age, perhaps now would be a good time to bring up the fact that you sat behind Moses in the 3rd grade! (Cackle… Cackle)