amazing computer stuff

[Frank Fusco]

As is known here, I am behind the curve with things computer. Actually, I consider I am not doing too badly considering that in my lifetime so far I have seen new cars that came with crank starts, horse drawn wagons that delivered household goods to my mother, our 'refrigerator' was actually an ice box, etc. Now, these days cars are super techno-whiz things that tell you how to get where you want to go and, of course, our many-many computer devices. My latest 'blows me away' new computer thingy is a micro sd card. This micro thingy is smaller than a dime (shown) and holds 256 gb of data. A bank in my town had an early computer that had a hard drive that held 40 mb of data. That hard drive was about 1'X2'X18" high and weighed well over 100 pounds. We hadn't even heard of gigabytes at that time. Now, I have 256 gigs available in a thing almost too tiny to handle. Next? Something smaller that holds over a 100 terabytes? I'm beyond surprising anymore.

 

[Vaughn McMillan]

Yeppers, it's pretty amazing how far (and fast) technology has moved during the time most of us here have been alive. The micro SD cards are a great example of that.

 

[Leo Voisine]

My drone uses a micro sd card. They have read write speed ratings. I bought a couple that did not work because the write speed was too slow.

 

[Ryan Mooney]

A bank in my town had an early computer that had a hard drive that held 40 mb of data. That hard drive was about 1'X2'X18" high and weighed well over 100 pounds.

My first job out of college (early 90s) they were decommissioning a server room that was basically the size of two large basketball courts plus a bit that was just rows of drives about that size (I think they were closer to 2x2x24 but that was largely packaging if I recall correctly). I was brought in to work on the new system that had about 100x the logical capacity but fit into roughly 3 medium fridge sized cases. As I was leaving that job 3 years later they were replacing the replacement system with another 20x capacity system (ish) that fit into one small dorm sized fridge. The replacement computers both ran into the high 100's of thousands to low millions when new...

About 10 years later LOML bought a video card for her computer (and not an especially high end one) for .. somewhere around $20 and it had the same chipset and compute capacity as the second replacement as the second computer (and was probably actually quite a bit faster because it was smaller).

Today you could buy a (relatively) cheap "watch" that is several orders of magnitude faster again.