Baden on storage space

I love visceral examples of how far computer technology has come. My Compilers professor Scott Baden, on the first computer he used in college:

We had a computer that had 16 K of memory. That was it. And… 6 megabyte disks. Now my camera takes 6 megabyte pictures.

What used to be larger than a washing machine is now of no consequence. In the course of an afternoon we can create vastly more data than machine rooms could hold even a few decades ago. Do we ever stop and give thought to how much data we truly create?

One Response to “Baden on storage space”

  1. Rick Auricchio says:

    Luxury. What about 110KB floppies on Apple ][ running UCSD Pascal?

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