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Almost impossible to believe

The other day I dropped a 128GB microSD card and it fell into a large cardboard box that contained a raft of "junk" I'd been preparing to throw out.

It took quite some time to finally locate that tiny card in amongst all the bits of discarded 3D printing, sheets of paper, wires, screws and other detritus that had accumulated over the past few months.

Eventually I did spot it and fished it out -- all those video files, safe at last.

These daus I'm so used to working with microSD cards, M2 SSD drives and high capacity USB thumb drives of 128GB or more that I seldom give a thought for just how much data these things can store or how small they are.

Let's face it, 128GB is an awful lot of data.

We used to marvel that it was possible to fit an entire reem of paper's worth of text on an old floppy drive -- but that's nothing compared to today's solid-state storage.

While browsing YouTube yesterday, I came across a video that really rammed home just how far we've come in terms of data storage scale and density over the past several decades.

Take a look at this video and marvel at how bulky, expensive and slow memory was back in the early days of computing:

We are constantly reminded of Moore's Law in respect to advances in processors but it's easy to forget that this also applies to memory -- maybe even more so.

When today, we have orders of magnitude more storage on a microSD card that is around the same size as our thumbnail than used to fit in a memory unit the size of a fridge-freezer just 50 short years ago, that's awesome!

Right now, everyone's complaining about the cost of memory but imagine how much it would cost to create a capacity of 16GB using magnetic core memory or any of the other technologies documented in that video. Perhaps we should be very thankful, despite the extortionate prices right now.

We'd also be completely hamstrung if we were still working with memory-access speeds measured in milliseconds, like those old relay and mechanical systems delivered, rather than the nanoseconds we demand today.

We may still be little more than bald apes -- but we're rather clever really.

Carpe Diem folks!

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