Joe Auricchio

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?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 17:06 and is filed under Quoting, Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.