memory

Wow! It's been quite a while since I posted.

Today, I was remembering the old BBS scene, right before the internet explosion into mainstream society. Anyway, back in the 80's, my kids and I used to belong to a computer club named Computer and Telecommunications Society, or CATS for short. We'd meet once a month at a local restaurant to chat with other like minded individuals and learn what was going on in the BBS scene; we'd meet the BBS sysops and co-sysops. I guess that's one of the reasons my kids got so interested in computers so early. My daughter was probably the youngest member, but she could get into muds and chatrooms and meet people from all over the US and was doing email long before a lot of her friends; in fact, when we went to New York once, she already knew people there whom she'd met through irc, I believe. This was before even Mosaic was developed.

Anyway, I remember one time one of the sysops telling us that his hard drive was one gig. That was mind boggling for us. Imagine one gig storage for all the files on his computer (Dos). I couldn't imagine how many files would be in the download directory of the bbs with that much storage. Back then, the hard drives were huge, not the 3.5 hard drives we have today. There was one hard drive called Bigfoot, so you can imagine what size it was. And they were expensive too. I figure the price would have been about a dollar a meg. I can't begin to imagine how much a one gig hard drive would actually cost.

Contrast that to today. The other day I went to a local store and saw a 512mg SD card for $19. They ran out of those, but the one gig SD card was on sale for $35. That's quite a contrast not only in size of the media, but also in price. That's quite a contrast in 20 something years. Back then, storage like this would have been unimaginable to me; now I wonder what it'll be like in a few years.

seen at Texas Book Festival