Technology amazes me

[Dr. Marneaus]

I'm pretty tech savy, but even with that, I'm amazed every day by random bits of common technology.

My flash drive fell apart the other day, so I figure'd I get a new one seeing as even though it still works, the 2 gig one was old, fell apart, and is always full of schoolwork.

Well, went to Fry's electronics and found this guy!

Cheap price, 4 gig, perfect. but holy crap it's absolutely TINY. I kinda regret buying it because I'm afraid it'll break or get lost easily.

4 gigabytes of information on this tiny thing? How is it possible! the only thing that blows my mind even more are micro SD cards. I also saw a regular flash drive that was 32 gb. Man, how do they do it?

comparison to my hand, a regular sized flash drive and a house key.

 

[Not A Nice Person]

Amazing, isn't it? And to think I still remember "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" punchcards!

Went to a conference in Dallas recently. They gave every attendee a tiny little flashdrive with all the Powerpoints and handouts and documents on it . . . thing's smaller than my little finger and has over 10X the memory of my first computer.

~Boar

 

[Dr. Marneaus]

I saw this picture a while ago.

1 gig hard drive from 1987 and 1 gig SD card from 2007.

 

[AVB]

If that really is from 1987 and if I had to guess I'd say that is a 355MB drive. The one gig threshold was crossed much later with a smaller drive. To give you an idea I spent $2200 out the door (on sale!) for a 40 meg drive in June 1986.

 

[Bxcigrfan]

well i found this on google
"1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000."

linky

 

[NorCalCigarLover]

Wow, that brings back memories. I layed out some of those boards used on the old IBM drives and have been working on some of the newer flash technology. The technology advancement is amazing indeed.

 

[junkman_56]

When I first started in the computer industry, I worked on main frame computers.
Huge rooms of computers with less computing power than a modern PC.
They had hard drives that were as large as a washing machine; 16 platters, 32 heads and 512mb of storage.

We have come a long way...