How Do You Like It: Moore Moore Moore!

[ornoth]

When I was in school, the original IBM PC came out. Anyone who used them will never forget carrying a handful of those black-sleeved 5¼-inch floppy disks around. Talk about data portability! You could fit the entire PC-DOS operating system on one 360 kB floppy and still have room left over for some user files. A blank diskette could hold the equivalent of about 175 pages of text!

But the cool kids never used PCs; we had Big Iron. At that time, most of the disk drives used on the university’s IBM mainframe were 3380s. Each drive was the size of a refrigerator and held 2.5 GB of data (about 7,300 floppies). You could daisy-chain eight of them together into a string that was about the size of one of those moving/storage “pod” containers (see below) and which held 20 GB.

After I graduated from college, I ran a mainframe shop for a company doing statistical analysis of medical records, and I bought a couple strings of used 3380s. Man, those were the days when people knew you were computing hard! Nowadays you can get one of those fingernail-sized MicroSD cards (see below) with 64 GB of storage—the equivalent of three full strings of 3380s!—for less than fifty bucks.

Where is all this going? Today I received shipment of an external hard drive to backup my home laptop. Two freakin’ terabytes. That’s the equivalent of 820 of those refrigerator-sized 3380s, all sitting in the palm of my hand in a box that’s about the size of a paperback novel.

Boggle!

Comments

[imperator-mei.livejournal.com]

I used have an old newspaper clipping from my college newspaper. The content of the clipped article I've long since forgotten, but I do remember that on the back of the clipping was an ad from the local computer store: "20MB hard drive, installed, only $2,000!"

[imperator-mei.livejournal.com]

And of course, this will be recursive. 20 years from now we'll the think the scale of this comparison is ridiculous, like someone marveling at the leap from 2 to 20 horsepower in car engines.

(Or, conversely, we'll be grousing about how memory just plateaued and we're having to buy 3 buckets of memory chips just to load SimCity 12: Infinite Sprawl.)