From time to time I am forced to stop and pause to reflect for a moment on the nature of the crazy technological changes that have happened in my lifetime.
Sometimes it’s realizing how cool it is that I can carry a phone around with me in my pocket, and that phone lets me get in touch with people all over the world, for instant live conversation. Sometimes it’s trying to remember what getting books used to be like in the days before the Internet.
And sometimes it’s thinking about hardware.
That’s a picture of a 5MB hard drive from 1956, fifty years ago. (Image, and more details, at Popular Pictures.)
That’s a picture of a 1TB hard drive currently sitting on my desk. For comparison purposes, that’s 1,000,000 Mb.
I don’t know what the 5Mb drive cost in 1956, but I’m sure it was ridiculously expensive. The 1Tb drive in 2006 is a consumer item–you can get it for around $600, since it’s already obsolete.
The 1956 drive weighed a ton. The one on my desk weighs around 15 pounds. That’s 0.0025 Mb/pound compared to 66,666.66666 Mb/pound, or a difference of 2,666,666,666.667% in information density.
You can put not quite 2 minutes of losslessly stored CD quality sound in 5Mb. You can put roughly 238 days of lossless CD quality sound in 1Tb.
Imagine what people will be walking around with on their belt in 2056… (Of course, whatever it is, it will probably only be a cache anyway, since they’ll probably be swimming a thick soup of wireless data streams.)
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