I carried my PC to school, uphill, in five feet of snow

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I got an email today at work talking about the disk space required for a database on a server I?m building:

The entire collection of the databases for this project total approx 10GB (includes backups, logs, etc), which is very small.

The phrase got me: ?very small?. Ten gigabytes is ?very small?? Since when? Am I that old?

Yup.

My first computer, the VIC-20, could store 4,096 bytes, or characters, in its memory ? ?4KB? or just ?4k?.

This was circa 1981, the year Moving Pictures was released (just thought I'd throw that in), and just after Bill Gates famously/allegedly said ?Nobody will ever need more than 640k of memory?.

For a sense of scale, here are 4,096 characters:



Not much, is it?

That was the sum total of what would fit into my first computer. With that, I played games ? which more often than not, I typed in by hand from the small print in the back pages of COMPUTE! magazine; kept track of my Christmas present buying list complete with an animated Christmas tree and corny music; and calculated biorhythms. Yeah, I know. I was young.

Let?s look at what?s transpired since then, in relation to that 4k. For a lark, I'll measure data in the ?VIC-20? scale: multiples of 4,096 characters. (I?ll round the numbers so you won?t get all bleary-eyed.)

Just a couple of years later, my next machine was the Commodore 64, with 64K of memory (how creative), or 16 times the memory of the VIC-20. These machines stored lots more than that on cassette tapes (but I don't remember how much).

My first IBM-compatible had maybe 256k of memory, and two floppy drives (A: & B: - no C: drive) at 360k each - 90 VIC-20s.

When I was in college (~1990) I was amazed by the first hard drives ("C:") I used, which were of the 20 megabyte variety, or 5,000 VICs. Then came the 300MB drives ?76,000 now, and I?m now highlighting the number of VIC-20s so I can stop typing ?VIC-20?. There.

That was about a ten year span. Let?s speed this narrative up, since you get the idea.

By the mid-90?s, the PCs I dealt with were heading for the gigabyte disk size level ? a gigabyte being 256,000 on our scale.

When I got to my current employer, we were using 9GB drives ? 2,400,000 - for an entire server. MS Windows, applications, and data, all on this amount of disk.

(As far as memory goes - we now buy servers with a minimum of 4GB of memory, or 1,000,000 on the VIC scale.)

Moderately expensive hard drives now hold 146 GB (38 million). We put a bunch of these drives together to form 500GB (131 million) ?virtual? drives.

The 10 GB ?very small? database (2.6 million VIC-20s) is considered negligible on a server that can have ten of those 500GB drives, or 1 billion VICs worth of storage attached to it.

We back that up to tapes every night and send them to the archives in a small box the size of carry-on luggage.

In the next year or so, we?ll be able to back up those 2.6 million VICs on a card the size of my car?s key fob. We can already do more than half that in that space.

The next small-disc technology to replace DVDs will hold the data equivalent of 480 million VICs on one plastic disc exactly the size of your ?Men in Black? DVD. This already works in practice, and the industry is working to bring this technology to your living room - within, if I had to guess, about five years.

Looks like I?ll have to buy the White Album again.