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Over the years, technology has grown rapidly, and it advances with a geometric progression rather than an arithmetical one. As a teenager, I did not witness the birth of the storage technology, thus I am not able to see the vast difference between then and now. Fortunately, the graphic above enables me to visualize how huge 20GB of storage looked like back in the 1980s, and compare it with today’s extremely small 32GB microSD card.
Besides comparing the size of the mammoth and the ant, take a good look at the prices too. The IBM 3380 Disk Systems would have cost you a massive $648,000 – $1,137,600 but the Samsung 32GB microSD card, which weighs just 0.5 grams or 0.0001 pounds, comes with a relatively low price tag of $100 – $150.
So what new storage technology do we anticipate in the near future? Will the 32GB microSD become a spec of dust 20 years down the road when I am at the peak of my adulthood? Maybe.
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That is pretty funny! I wonder what it is going to be like in 10 years, when we have 10 TB thumb sticks for $20.
In 10 years we will probably have bio-thumb drives of few TBs
Problem with the storage increase is that it always remains relatively the same. That is, storage capacity increases but so is the content size – bigger video/music/photo files.
Haha. I think of my 32GB iPod touch when I saw this. Actually the size of files has also grown rapidly; I have over 20GB of movies and over 30GB of games myself…
Yeah im from “81 and i am glad i watched the peak of the tech-advancements… Not that those days were so wonderfull (even then i was craving for more gadgets, webby stuff and integration of hardware and always-on connections) but i think it is good to know what people could do on a few K’s of space.
If one would take into notice how little space was used before that would help to build compact software onto nowadays hardware and create fast solutions that fire up in secs.
The iPad (not downgrading a laptop to a tablet, but upgrading a (i)phone to tablet) makes a nice example. The compact coding of (uch) Windows 7 also proves that creating clean code from the ground up makes a nice story…
Remember where you’re coming from to empower where you’re going!