Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
What Terabyte Times We're Living Through
The other day I was going through one of my semi-regular musings at how incredibly fast the world's computing prowess has developed in our lifetimes. On this occasion I was with some work colleagues and we'd been discussing the amount of computing power in mobile phones; for example, the one I've just set up (six months after taking delivery of it!) has 8GB of storage.
All of us in the conversation were old enough to have worked with both of the most common formats of floppy disk. So, we set about trying to work out how many floppies we'd need to equal the storage capacity offered by a finger nail size storage device on the phone. It seems that it would have been roughly 11,000 of the 3½ floppies (the hard cased one) and about 22,000 of the older 5¼ version.
In my inbox this morning an exhortation from Amazon to buy a 1TB external hard disk - that's 1,000 gigabytes - for under £80. Unreal.
Tags for Forum Posts: technology
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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My first computer loaded stuff in from a cassette tape (if you were lucky) and the pages of the computer magazines that made their way down to NZ were full of "listings" that you had to type in.
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Permalink Reply by Nigel Lupton (luptonn) on
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Wired had an interesting article in July about the Petabyte age (http://tinyurl.com/5sduxw). Some of the conclusions caused some interesting discussions at work where we regularly have to deal with large data warehouses. I think the storage of large amounts of data is now relatively easy, but the tools to collect and analyze are a long way behind.
A personal example of this is that iTunes is now reporting that I have over 100GB of music, yet if if I look at my play stats on last.fm I've been listening to the same tracks for the last 3 months.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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This afternoon, my husband attempted to rationalise the tape collection, we still have one, and then had to rescue two of mine from the bin when I found out! We still have a turntable and vinyl. We sometimes discuss making everything into one big collection but he can no more bring himself to consign his records to history then I can contemplate the loss of 'Happy hour' by Ted Hawkins.
I love the thought of it all on the same little disc somewhere but there is as yet no replacement for flicking through the albums or selecting the little tape you made...I am sooo old!
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