I'm getting old...

[ffutures]

It's sometimes difficult for me to grasp just how quickly really big really tiny storage devices have become (a) possible and (b) cheap.

Back in my TRS-80 days in the eighties my first floppy disks were 64k (about 1/20th Mb). My first PC had a 360k floppy drive and eventually a 5mb hard disk - an external box about the size of a very large shoe box. I don't think I got above 5gb total storage in a PC until 1998 or so.

The first Forgotten Futures distribution was on 720k floppies, the second on 1.44gb, by 2004 or so I was using CD-ROM for the distribution disks. That will still be OK for a couple more releases... I hope. I've got too much invested in a CD duplicator to want to give up on them.

Five or so years ago I remember paying ten or twelve pounds for a 64mb memory stick. The capacity went up real fast, and the price rapidly came down. I currently own a 4gb stick that cost about eight pounds, and a 1gb stick that cost about the same a year or so earlier.

Today I went to BETT, a fairly big UK educational technology show. And Microsoft were giving away 1gb sticks, free to anyone who wanted to help themselves from goldfish bowls on the stand. And eventually I came away a little disappointed because the technology on offer wasn't terribly exciting, and there really wasn't much else there in the way of freebies this year - I could have bought four or five sticks that size for less than it cost me to go there, if I factor in an unusually expensive lunch. I couldn't even find anyone giving away decent mugs, and I could do with a few more...

Meanwhile, you can get 30gb in something a little smaller than a packet of cigarettes for twenty quid. What surprises me about this one is the fact that I really can't think of a good reason to carry something so bulky - by the time I need it there will probably be 32gb sticks for considerably less.

No moral here - just a slight case of shell-shock!

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

What sometimes additionally boggles me is what people use all this storage capacity for?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I generally have the work in progress on a stick - all of the files for the current Forgotten Futures come out at a couple of hundred megabytes, but most of that is backup files, early versions of images, the big Word file that will be converted into much smaller PDF and HTML files, and other stuff that won't be on the final disk. I have no idea at all what people do with the REALLY big sticks, but a big database (for example) could easily be a couple of gigs, so I'd imagine that there are good uses. You could easily fill any size if you accumulate enough music, porn, etc. etc.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

And when I ask myself just how much music or porn people need, I pause, and remember human nature. And think to myself, yeah, they probably do fill up.

Plus I guess if people are in the habit of downloading a lot of High-Def movies, those must run into hefty file sizes.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I've got a 64 GB iPod Touch that's nearly full — and it would be if I synced it with all my music.

Mt Aperture photo library is about 800 GB, and that's photos I've taken or processed. When a single panorama takes 1.3 GB at full resolution, storage fills fast.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Good lord, 1.3gb for a single photographic image? That's extraordinary.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

16-bit TIFF of a panorama stitched from 200+ images.

The detail is quite good even on the smaller shots, like this one:
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/4254749783/)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Did you actually mean to post that here?

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

That was supposed to show as a thumbnail. I'm not certain why it's displaying so large — it looked a lot smaller when I previewed it. I can delete it and try again if you like (I can't edit the posting, but feel free to if you can (and the HTML fix is really obvious).

I was trying to show why some images had huge files. This one is around 80 MB after conversion to 8-bit and compression — around 400 MB otherwise. This is why my 1 TB hard disk (for photos) is nearly full.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

fair enough.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Gosh, that's amazing. Thanks for sharing.

[kayshapero]

I consider it rather thoughtful of progress that it seems to want to speed up as I get older. I get to see more of it that way. :)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Indeed. In the last three years, I bought three external hard drives for backup purposes. Each had twice the capacity of the previous one while the price was about the same. Crazy.
Similar with CF cards. I'm now paying the same amount of money for a 16GB card I paid for a 2GB card four years ago...

[booster17.livejournal.com]

*blink blink* I was at a friends house this evening when his wife came back from London where she'd been working at BETT. And I saw her giving the kids those free 1gb sticks away to their kids as well.

Spooky.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think that something like fifty thousand people go to BETT every year, it's pretty big. It'd be surprising if nobody else on my friends list knew anyone who had been there.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Today's XKCD was on a variation of this very topic:

http://xkcd.com/691/

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, I noticed.