My how far we've come

I sit here in my bonus room moving scads of data around from a Firewire 400 to a USB 2.0 disk and it occurred to me how far we've come with personal computers. My computer is not remarkable, in fact it's rather outdated being a simple 1.5 Ghz Apple mini G4. But what amazes me is I have a gig of ram (not remarkable) and one terrabyte of disk space (today not remarkable) yet a far cry from the sixty gig it shipped with from the factory.

It wasn't too long ago I witnessed my first 1 gig RAM installation in a Silicon Graphics server in the then Glaxo data center back in, oh, 1994/5 or so. Back then that was amazing! The gig of ram fit onto a single board the size of a spiral-bound notebook and slid into a massive chassis the size of an upright refrigerator. The largest consumer data disk you could purchase on the open market at the same time was a Western Digital 1 gig drive and that seemed massive in its size. Now a gig of disk space is laughable. Hell, I have two USB thumb drives downstairs that combine to greater than eight gig - and I spent less than $15 on them COMBINED!!! To put things in perspective the first Western Digital 1 Gig hard drives cost $1000.00 retail. Now it's possible to have a gig or more of VIDEO RAM!! Amazing. What's next I can only imagine.

True, applications today require more disk space. A video editing suite such as iMovie, Final Cut or whatever the Windows version is from Adobe or others can generate multiple gigs of data in a sitting. Garage Band, the app I wish I could use should I be able to play an instrument, can itself eat up half a gig with a single multi-track song. Speaking of Garage Band, I wonder what would it cost to commission Larry Karnowski to record a copy of Plastic Jesus in Garage Band for me? Let me know, Larry. I'd love to have a copy of that song recorded by someone I know, it's one of my favorites. Bring it over when you're done and we'll all watch Cool Hand Luke. At the beach, if you want.

My, how far we've come with personal computing. How far can we go and what it will be like when we get there?

Scotty, beam me up.