Last week, I wrote here about how I bought a 1-Tbyte external hard drive for backup after I noticed how low the prices had dropped on external drives.
I also noticed that the prices of USB memory sticks had dropped considerably. Since I was in the market to replace my well-worn 1-Gbyte memory stick, I hit the "Add To Shipping Cart" button as soon as I saw an 8-Gbyte stick for $16 on Amazon last week. The stick arrived on Wednesday and I immediately put it to good use.
Back in 1978, I paid $599 for 16-kbyte of RAM for my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I computer. Adjusted for inflation, that $599 would buy me 124 Tbytes of memory today! Amazing!
Just bought Eight 1GB DDR Modules to replace 128MB ones installed six years ago.
ReplyDeletePer unit of RAM the new is roughly 1/20 the cost before we even go anywhere near the change in the value of the 2002 dollar to my puchased this week.
But then I had a 70/300 baud split rate modem way back when which was as big as six of ASUS EEPC mini-computers and cost $1200 when that was real money.
73
Steve
K9ZW
http://k9zw.wordpress.com/
Steve --- I used to work for a company that I nicknamed "Modems R Us" and have a small collection of "antique" modems that fall under the boat anchor category.
ReplyDeleteThen you will appreciate the old split 75/300 baid unit. Used it mostly for Telex, Prestel and very early none-realtime-packet email systems while in the UK.
ReplyDeleteReplaced it with an even bigger physically device that could do several speeds - 75/75, 75/300, 300/300 and splits with ... whee hold on... 1200 baud.
You could almost decode the traffic from the flashing LEDs on the side!!
73
Steve
K9ZW
http://k9zw.wordpress.com/
Mind you, once upon a time you could fit the OS, a word processor and a few other programs on a 360K floppy. These days, a fair number of the emails I get wouldn't even fit on one of those discs.
ReplyDeleteThe best thing about new memory technologies is that it forces you to finally toss out old data. I've got some files on 8" floppies that I'll never see again... Good riddance in most cases but it's said that a large part of our history during this era is doomed to be lost because of short-lifetime or rapidly obsoleted storage. It's time to dump the old zip disks.
On a different note: With the availability of high capacity flash sticks, consider devoting one to a collection of useful programs. PortableApps has a nice system for packaging programs for USB flash drives. They've got a useful set of pre-configured open-source applications that make it feasible to carry a 'portable desktop' in your pocket. My version even has a MacintoshPlus emulator (with Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle games) and a freeware antenna simulation program.
And don't forget that many Linux and BSD OSes can also be made to run from USB drives. A 4Gb drive is easily enough for Ubuntu (8Gb leaves lots of room to spare). Google PenDriveLinux for more info.