ffutures | I'm getting old...

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!