Big numbers
Sometime back in the early 90s, I bought my first PC.
At the time, I wanted a top of the range model, as I wanted it to be future proof. I therefore went for the maximum amount of memory and a huge hard disk size. Everyone said I was mad, and that I would never be able to fill the hard disk, but I went ahead and bought it anyway.
It had 2Mb of memory, and the hard disk was a massive 40Mb. It was a very fast PC too, and ran at 16Mhz. I was the envy of the office. It was worth every penny of the £1,800 I spent.
I’m writing this on a laptop. It cost me under €800. It has 2Gb of memory and a 250Gb hard disk.
So it has 1,000 times the memory, and 62,500 times the hard disk space, and cost about one third the price.
Grandad uses the laptop from time to time, and has filled up most of the hard disk with his files. Frankly, I’m a bit wary of those files, and I’m a bit scared to look at them, but he is very possessive about them so I have to leave them there. He says it took him a long time to find those files on the Internet and has threatened violence if I remove them.
I decided to buy myself some additional hard disk space. It is a 1Tb drive. A Terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or the equivalent to 25,000 times my original PC’s capacity. Numbers like that scare me a little.
I am expecting delivery any time. My problem is that if Grandad finds out about it, he is going to appropriate it for his vast collection of images.
How many glossy photos can you store in a Terabyte?
A hell of a lot, I would imagine…
Photos of WHAT? Is there a herself to supervise in this case?
Oooh, I get it now…Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Wow! What a premise for a new site. I have a great idea then…
You can comment on each other’s sites. Yeah! Comment on one another’s posts, argue a bit and perhaps throw and insult or two.
I wonder how long you could keep it up before someone became the wiser? You couldn’t use your real name though or link to this site. Might be fun though.
That is if you could handle it mentally(pay no attention to me…I’m sick). 😛
Oh yeah, I bought my first PC around the time you did although I had been walking in and out of huge main frame computers for awhile by then. It was a 386sx33 with 2mb of memory which I upgraded to 4mb at the cost of 70 bucks. Mine had a 30mb hard drive though. I paid $1200.00 for the thing.
Now, my current old beater was top of the line in 2003, AMD 3200+ (P4 30ghz equiv), 1gb memory, 200gb HDD and came with a 17″ flat panel display for all of $600.00.
One terabyte? Good Lord man. I’m still having trouble filling up that little hard drive I got (86% left).
I’m not sure what the photos are. I have been too scared to look, and I want to have some kind of defense in court.
The new drive is intended as a backup. If you add all my PCs up, the disk space come close to a terabyte.
I still fondly remember my Commodore 64.