Technology has come a long way. A friend of mine, back in college, once told me a story about when he was shown a 1 GB drive – and this was back in the days when 1 GB was impossibly huge (sort of like, say, how big 1 terabyte might seem to us right now). The drive itself was absolutely huge, and it weighed a ton (well, not literally, but you get the idea). My friend thought it was pretty cool, and when he was asked “but what would you do with a gig of drive space?” he replied: “Doublespace it!”
Er, okay, many of you may not get the joke, but look up a history of MS-DOS and you’ll see that at one point it shipped with a utility called “Doublespace,” which compressed your hard drive to give you more space. Now maybe the joke will make sense.
Anyway, I’ve got a 1 GB drive at work at the moment – it’s a relic from my grandfather’s computer. When I showed it to my co-worker Tom, he pulled his 1 GB memory card out of his PocketPC – and the comparison was so stark that I just had to take a picture.
In case you can’t get a sense of scale, the drive on the left weighs about 8 lbs and is the size of my head. The memory card on the right weighs almost nothing, and is the size of a postage stamp.
Heh. How far we’ve come, indeed.
