It was three decades ago or so, I think. My buddy Joe Reynolds had attended an ACM meeting, and he was telling me that we would soon have hard drives with gigabyte capacities. I was deep into my career as a private physician, and a 120mB drive seemed an almost infinite amount of storage. We had both grown up in the times of 128-byte RAM memory spaces and 5mB drives.
So, here we are today, and I think of Evertte Dirksen who I might misquote as having said, “A Gigabyte here and a Terabyte there, and pretty soon we’re talking real storage.”
Our son gave us a collection of Sci-Fi movies for Christmas last year; like his mother, he’s a very thoughtful sort. The collection included the entire Battlestar Galactica saga with Edward James Olmos, the complete Space Above and Beyond series, and a few other classics stored on a 256GB Sandisk micro-SD card. The idea was that Susan and I could watch our favorite Sci-Fi on any trip regardless of Wi-Fi availability.
This gave me an idea. For years, I have been recording all of my astrophotography work on Blu-ray discs. One disc holds about 20GB of data. I decided to order a 1TB Sandisk micro-SD card to use to archive my astrophotography work. It uses up a lot less physical space than the discs and is just a little more expensive than all those Blue-ray discs.
I ordered my first 1TB medium from Amazon a couple of days ago. It arrived this evening. The device is about the size of my thumbnail. Ha! I may order several more after I archive this past year’s astrophotographs.