It is rumored that Bill Gates once said, “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” back in 1981. He denies ever saying it although personally, I’m not sure why he cares. If I had $50 billion I don’t think I would even be able to hear rumors about me through my solid gold bedroom doors as I lay down in my bed made of rubies and emeralds Richie Rich style.
"What?I can't hear you. I am taking a dump on my diamond toilet."
Still, it is kind of a goofy statement to make and shows that people can be a little shortsighted. I had my own Bill Gates moment a year ago when we bought a new computer. It had a 500Gb hard drive and I had another 250Gb external drive hooked up to it. I remember looking at it and thinking my days of upgrading were done.
Of course this last week my computer laughed in my face as it warned me that I was down to less than 10Gb in each drive. It even showed me a red bar graph to really rub it in, because nothing is more depressing and scary than a red bar warning graph.
We have no idea what this graph is about but the red bar is probably something bad.
Much like the 20 pounds I put on since college I have no idea how it got to this point. But somehow between our music, documents, software and family photos and videos we have managed to fill up 480 Gb of hardrive space. That amount of space should hold about 500 copies of the Encylopedia Brittanica, a summary of everything in the world.
Somehow I have stored enough pictures and videos of my son pouring juice on his head that it takes up more space than the sum total of our collective human knowledge. This is both awesome and frightening.
History and science? Forget it, no room, got 50 more of these pictures.
Not only have I filled up the hard drives but I also have stacks of cds and dvds that I have burned as back ups. This got me to thinking whether this was all really a hopeless cause. Yeah, those dvds and cds are great for now but what happens when no one has the equipment to even read them anymore? What happens when people think back to dvds, horse drawn carriages and bell bottoms in the same sad way?
Some people might think this is a bit paranoid but a brief look at technological history shows that it’s just a matter of time before I’ll be forced to buy the next generation of storage medium, or risk being a metaphorical homeless geek, huddled with my collection of shiny disks.
Still, my current storage is better than some of the less than stellar technology we’ve had since computers first began their quest to take over to the world and enslave mankind.
1. Punch Cards
This kind of number is so stone age I didn’t even have a frame of reference for what 50 bytes meant. After some poking around I found out that to the average low resolution picture would require the equivalent of 1000 punch cards.
If you think this sucks you should see the video.
Millions and millions of these paper cards were made and stored everyday and IBM was making a killing with this new fangled technology. For about 60 years these cards were responsible for running the world’s most advanced machines. But these machines took up entire floors of office buildings so playing World of Warcraft on punch cards was really not an option.
You would think that something so awkward and cumbersome could not have been much use but in fact when the US government began using them for the census it cut down the time to complete the census from 10 years to one year. This of course means that humans are really freaking slow if a paper card is with holes in it is 10 times faster than a person doing the same job.
"You're replacing me with what?"
2. Datasette Tapes
By the 1970′s basic personal computers were becoming more popular and a few uber geeks had home computers.
Casette tapes were used as a cheap way to store programs or whatever constituted porn back then.
Apparently this.
Each tape could hold about 1000 Kb of data, and you had the added advantage of being able to go grab dinner and watch a T.V.show while your program loaded because the cassettes played in real time, just like a music cassette.
Cassette tapes ruled the nerd scene for less than 10 years. They were a huge improvement over the punch cards in terms of being able to hold more information in much less space. Actually using them was mind numbing though because you couldn’t just jump to the program you wanted. Each time you wanted to load a program you had to rewind the entire tape and then run it from the beginning. Of course this was offset by the fact that you could protect your data from being accidentaly deleted using nothing more than a piece of clear tape.
I got your read/write protection right here.
3. Iomega Zip Drive
Zip drives were introduced in 1994 and could hold about 100MB when they first came out. Compared to regular 3.5 inch floppies with their 1.4 MB storage these zip drives were supposed to be a huge improvement for people to store their data in one place.
Unfortunately for many people this meant that all their data would be in a place where it would promptly get chewed up and destroyed by a product called the 1
5th worst piece tech products of all time by PC World. As an example of how bad it was the zip drive beat out the
Digi Scents iSmell which as you might have guessed, blasted you with smells from different company websites.
You really had to watch out for Farts.com.
Seems the zip drives had something that users referred to as the “Click of Death”. Not to be confused with the “Game of Death” which was awesome, the Click of Death was the term people used when their zip drives would die. That was the death part. The click part referred the the sound the drive would make as it wrecked whatever disk was inside at the time causing you to lose all your information because not only did it suck, it was also vindictive.
"Nom, nom, nom, nom."
4. LaserDiscs
These giant pre-historical ancestors to the CD first came out in 1978. As a foreshadowing of their suckiness they were first marketed as “Discovision”. Later they used LaserDisc to make something really stupid at least sound amazing.
We present: Laser Douche
These giant 12″ discs were competing with VHS tapes for the home porn movie market and basically went nowhere except in Asia because people in Asia think that everything with lasers is better. Not only were the giant discs heavy but despite their size they could only hold about
30 minutes worth of video on each side. This meant that most movies required more than one disc and you had to get up and flip or change discs to finish the movie.
Watching Lord of the Rings would have been a bitch.
Combine this with the fact that the discs were more prone to damage from handling and you wind up with a product that didn’t really do anything very well. Finally laser discs had their own unique problem called ‘laser rot’ which would cause the images on the disc to be damaged like some kind of technological STD.
Not only did these storage formats suck, but except for punch cards none of them lasted very long before they were replaced by something better. So in the end I’ll just keep backing up my files on whatever the tech gods throw at me, but I also started using something my parents have used successfully for the last 40 years.
Behold, the future.
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/hr_Star_Trek_Into_Darkness_32-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/04/thesimpsons-what-a-time-to-be-alive-150x150.png)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/03/Archer_AK_4-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/03/handsOUYA1-150x150.png)
Behold, I am the biggest dolt a-hole in the history of Zip Drives. I put my life on one of those things and I’m proud to say that I have a worthless old dead disk to remind me how terrible a decision it was.
I still have a sealed box of 144 MB discs. It’s my retirement plan.
I remember buying a 14.4 modem thinking that I’m gonna blaze through the information superhighway, as it was called back then, but in the end entering the “AOL keyword” was still the same speed.
Well, at the time I thought Laser Discs were awesome as hell (I also thought my 1200 baud modem was one speedy damn thing). I also remember telling my dad when he got a 500 meg hard drive that it “would take forever to fill that up!” And 100 meg Zip drives? Scrape the brain matter off the ceiling!
Now, a 20 gig folder is a small one.
Jesus, I feel old.
We were just discussing at work this week how most cell phones now are three or four time more powerful that a decent PC just 10 years ago. Sounds like punch cards have the longest reign any tech ever will.
The punch cards reign of 60 years is due to the fact that they were a rare breed on the digital evolutionary scale.
Almost amphibian, they are both analog and digital at the same time. Hard copy paper that can, and often would, jam the feeder, get misplaced, bent folded, and or otherwise mutilated, they still were the first interface of the analog world to the digital world!
It still amazes me that Iomega is still around! And they INSIST on selling the “zip” products as well! The Zip drive never took off IMO because it was so short lived. Death rattles asside, the optical floppy came out right on its heels. A rewritable 120MB floppy drive was pretty cool back then. Then the rewritable CD came out and blew all else away.
28.8 modem. Click to download dirty picture. Go get a sandwich, come back to check on the download. Thems were the days.
I remember getting my first 1 gig HD and saying to my GF at the time, “It’ll take forever to fill this up!” Six months later I was wondering what to delete in order to get Mechwarrior to fully install, lol. And as for cellphones, my current cell has more processing power and more ram than my first 4 PC’s combined!
60 years of punch card experience and yet people in Florida STILL couldn’t figure out how to vote.
Say what you will about LaserDisc, but it uses the same non-lossy technology used in CD manufacturing. The image is crystal-clear and they don’t compress data (i.e. throw out the stuff it thinks you can’t see or hear). LaserDisc is to CD what DVD is to MP3. Lossy technology = crappy quality. So what if you had to turn them over. The image was pristine, as was the sound. It’s the same argument about Beta over VHS. Beta was far superior, but what did idiotic consumers pick – the cheapest and worst technology – VHS (it cost less and it showed). And besides LaserDisc editions gave you gobs of extra features about the film you were watching (which still works on some DVD’s today) but I’ll never find the extras from the “2001″ LaserDisc on the DVD versions. It’s still a viable option for “purists.” Don’t knock it until you’ve seen it.
My biology teacher still uses laserdiscs. D: