If you could go back 35years and ask what they guess this thumbnail sized card holds, I think they would guess 1K
As this is the size of 16K
If you told them it's above 1MB, some will gasp.
You tell them it's above 1GB, some will faint.
Tell them it's 256GB, people will start throwing chairs as the world must gone mad.
35 years ago was 1981. I was there. Already designing digital stuff in my first job with the GEC company. The size and expense of memory was a real drag.
On the other hand...
We were aware of Moore's observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
So, rather than throwing chairs us old guys have just been waiting patiently for reality to catch up with what's possible
35 years ago was 1981. I was there. So, rather than throwing chairs us old guys have just been waiting patiently for reality to catch up with what's possible
If you could go back 35years and ask what they guess this thumbnail sized card holds, I think they would guess 1K
As this is the size of 16K
If you told them it's above 1MB, some will gasp.
You tell them it's above 1GB, some will faint.
Tell them it's 256GB, people will start throwing chairs as the world must gone mad.
35 years ago if you would have told me that a thumbnail size card held 256GB I would have thought you were crazy. However, if you were able to convince me to you had come from 35 years in the future with the card, then I probably would have believed the 256GB thing. I also would have asked you if fusion power had made energy so cheap is was no longer worth charging for it. I would ask you about the colonies on the moon, and how many lived there in the year 2016. I also would ask how the manned Mars exploration was going, and if any signs of life had been found there.
While I'm at it I might ask if the Arpanet ever caught on, and what kind of dial-up speeds do modems support in 2016. And also, is the Arpanet still restricted to non-business activity.
Even those who were relatively familiar with Moore's law didn't always truly believe it.. as can be seen in e.g. cyberpunk novels. IIRC Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash severely underestimated future disk capacity, although when you read the book back then (or even a decade later) it looked like he had poured it on thick. But not now.. and if that's supposed to be our future, even less so.
However, even those who truly believed in Moore's law may have failed to see the price reduction. Let's look at disks (Flash is solid state storage, which invokes another futuristic science-fiction idea, which kind of sneaked into our reality with nobody really noticing how profound that is).
Well, I have been buying 3TB disks like candy, for triple-redundancy backups (just owning a single digital camera and taking some videos quickly fills up everything, and that's just the start). Those disks are cheap over here in Japan, when I buy them at the right place. I seem to remember that it was exactly 35 years ago (could be 36) my former college bought a 10MB disk for their minicomputer, and the price was more than $11k. Two years later we got a 5MB HDD for our Apple II at work, that one cost a fortune as well. Some years later I worked with 630MB SCSI disks, you could get 1.2GB disks from the same vendor, but those were slower to work with, for various reasons. Those were still terribly expensive.
But maybe someone could still imagine multi-TB disks back then. But I bet nobody could imagine that one could choose to pick one or two up just like that, on a whim, on your way to the counter to pay for something else. Biking home with groceries and a number of terrabytes of harddisk capacity in the bicycle basket.
Even those who were relatively familiar with Moore's law didn't always truly believe it.. as can be seen in e.g. cyberpunk novels. IIRC Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash severely underestimated future disk capacity, although when you read the book back then (or even a decade later) it looked like he had poured it on thick. But not now.. and if that's supposed to be our future, even less so.
However, even those who truly believed in Moore's law may have failed to see the price reduction. Let's look at disks (Flash is solid state storage, which invokes another futuristic science-fiction idea, which kind of sneaked into our reality with nobody really noticing how profound that is).
Well, I have been buying 3TB disks like candy, for triple-redundancy backups (just owning a single digital camera and taking some videos quickly fills up everything, and that's just the start). Those disks are cheap over here in Japan, when I buy them at the right place. I seem to remember that it was exactly 35 years ago (could be 36) my former college bought a 10MB disk for their minicomputer, and the price was more than $11k. Two years later we got a 5MB HDD for our Apple II at work, that one cost a fortune as well. Some years later I worked with 630MB SCSI disks, you could get 1.2GB disks from the same vendor, but those were slower to work with, for various reasons. Those were still terribly expensive.
But maybe someone could still imagine multi-TB disks back then. But I bet nobody could imagine that one could choose to pick one or two up just like that, on a whim, on your way to the counter to pay for something else. Biking home with groceries and a number of terrabytes of harddisk capacity in the bicycle basket.
Not even the sales guys working for computer companies had any idea of how fast the power of microprocessors and capacity of hard drives would increase back in the early to mid 70's. I still chuckle any time I am picking up a hard disk, sd card, or motherboard as I recall the comments the IBM and DEC folks made as I told them I was headed for the microcomputer area as wandered past.
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As this is the size of 16K
If you told them it's above 1MB, some will gasp.
You tell them it's above 1GB, some will faint.
Tell them it's 256GB, people will start throwing chairs as the world must gone mad.
On the other hand...
We were aware of Moore's observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
So, rather than throwing chairs us old guys have just been waiting patiently for reality to catch up with what's possible
But you weren't old back then. Time paradox!
While I'm at it I might ask if the Arpanet ever caught on, and what kind of dial-up speeds do modems support in 2016. And also, is the Arpanet still restricted to non-business activity.
However, even those who truly believed in Moore's law may have failed to see the price reduction. Let's look at disks (Flash is solid state storage, which invokes another futuristic science-fiction idea, which kind of sneaked into our reality with nobody really noticing how profound that is).
Well, I have been buying 3TB disks like candy, for triple-redundancy backups (just owning a single digital camera and taking some videos quickly fills up everything, and that's just the start). Those disks are cheap over here in Japan, when I buy them at the right place. I seem to remember that it was exactly 35 years ago (could be 36) my former college bought a 10MB disk for their minicomputer, and the price was more than $11k. Two years later we got a 5MB HDD for our Apple II at work, that one cost a fortune as well. Some years later I worked with 630MB SCSI disks, you could get 1.2GB disks from the same vendor, but those were slower to work with, for various reasons. Those were still terribly expensive.
But maybe someone could still imagine multi-TB disks back then. But I bet nobody could imagine that one could choose to pick one or two up just like that, on a whim, on your way to the counter to pay for something else. Biking home with groceries and a number of terrabytes of harddisk capacity in the bicycle basket.
Not even the sales guys working for computer companies had any idea of how fast the power of microprocessors and capacity of hard drives would increase back in the early to mid 70's. I still chuckle any time I am picking up a hard disk, sd card, or motherboard as I recall the comments the IBM and DEC folks made as I told them I was headed for the microcomputer area as wandered past.