LSW Posted February 26, 2009 Report Share Posted February 26, 2009 Consider this, Time started basically before and after Christ. Then it was marked by wars, before cars, before electricity, that sort of thing. Example: In early 70's or so I was in Elementary school in Barnesville OH. My Father was an Art Professor at Ohio University, Belmont Branch. So he is/was a "Doctor." Our next door neighbor was a really old woman. She stopped us one day and because my father was "really smart, professor and all..." and asked if the weird weather of the time could be caused by "those rocks those astronaut fellows took from the moon?" That is funny today, funny then... unless you knew her. She was the last survivor of the original few families who settled there in the Ohio Territory. She got there as a small child in a covered wagon reading Jules Vern by candle light. This women saw Electricity spread, planes fly, cars spread and men land on the moon... the unthinkable. I mark my age as before and after MTV, Computers, things like that. My Highschool in Michigan had one computer running command line, dot matrix printer with the connected paper if you remember that and the phone sat in a cradle! I was the second person in the US forces in West Berlin to buy a CD player, the PX had none so I had to go to a German record store who sold CD's, 7 them, I bought to, The Thompson Twins and West Sides Story's SoundTrack. Of course I was there when the wall came down but that is beyond scope. Then MP3's, MP4's DVD's DVD Burners, HD and BlueRay as well as BlueTooth. I watched the 8-Track market die and watched Beta videos on my sisters machine. Technology changes fast as we know. Yesterday I overheard a conversation about having to take old state records and digitalize them as the Microfiche do not last as long as our legislature people say we must keep files... ca. 100 years. So how to digitalize the records of employess and what all else of 50 years of thousands of employees and maybe those from the Alaskan Territory as well. To get to the point: It is estimated that we would require mass storage of .7 to 1.5 Petabytes! Errr... Hugh? Google Pointed the way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte. Think about it. Many of us started with Floppy disks of 2.5 kb? My first USB stick was 256mb and I was happy, now 3gb is average. My iPod Nano is 8GB... My first PC with Win98 SE was 8GB in 1999 and that was midline. Now common are even external drives of 750GB and 1 Terabyte are getting affordable. That since my fist 8GB PC in 1999, so 10 years later we can start talking Terabytes. Cell phones that were first just used by rich folks and drug dealers are common and gone from carrying a battery pack or a WWII walki-talki sized thing to ones so small you can keep them in a cigarette pack and can barely see the buttons, not to mention push one at a time. A digital watch has more computer power than the first luner landers... 1024 Bytes in a Megabyte 1024 MB in a Gigabyte 1024 GB in a Terabyte and we are talking storage now in Pitabytes for large organizations, 1024 Terabytes... it is hard for me to fathom actually. That woman asked a silly question for a small kid who grew up on space and moon walks. he grew up to see reusable space ships, and probes on mars. and portable info on a web and portable music. Server rooms that took up buildings now take up closet space. We are half way there... 1024 petabytes is a Exabyte. 1024 Exabytes is a Zettabyte 1024 Zetabyte is a Yottabyte... Then? I guess a planet super computer run by mice to tell us what the meaning of 47 is... aka Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. What byte size will my computer have when I die of old age at 100 years? What silly questions will I ask my neighbors and their snot nosed son? We went from low Gigabyte to low Terabyte in 10 years. in 2019 will we have Terabyte Pcs that are under powered and high end Petabyte showing on the market? Just thinking at you... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
falkencreative Posted February 26, 2009 Report Share Posted February 26, 2009 I guess a planet super computer run by mice to tell us what the meaning of 47 is... aka Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. Isn't it 42? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wickham Posted February 26, 2009 Report Share Posted February 26, 2009 Isn't it 42? Ask Arthur Dent or Zaphod Beeblebrox Yes, the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. I remember listening to the first few radio episodes and was fascinated. I must buy the cd of them. That and the Red Dwarf series about a mining ship that gets radioactive and is continually saved by a robot called Kryten. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSW Posted February 26, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 26, 2009 OK, it has been a while... corrected... 42. I have the audio books from some of his things... the one is with Thor, Odin and Loki and a Golden Eagle that is really a Tornado Fighter Bomber that upset Thor one day.... he is off on a tangent about late night Pizza and how Much Odin loves modern beds. But my favorites are the Probability drive (that turns missles into a whale and a palnt that thinks "Not again") before smashing into the planet and super intelligent shades of the color blue. Oh, and the cow that gets upset when Aurther does not want to eat any of it in the restaraunt at the end of the Universe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newseed Posted February 27, 2009 Report Share Posted February 27, 2009 1024 Zetabyte is a Yottabyte... ...and 1024 Yottabyte is a Indebtbyte... It's the only thing that will store our U.S. deficit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSW Posted February 27, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 27, 2009 Someone else I mentioned it to called it a Damabyte... "Damn that is big!" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrea Posted February 27, 2009 Report Share Posted February 27, 2009 Someone else I mentioned it to called it a Damabyte... "Damn that is big!"Which brings us full-circle, back to the same old question: "Does size matter..... or doesn't it???" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacRankin Posted February 27, 2009 Report Share Posted February 27, 2009 Are you a poet, LSW? There was something about your words that took me back a bit. I think I know how you feel, or rather, I probably only know how I feel, in that I'm already regretting knowing that I won't be around to enjoy all that lovely human advancement and technology when I'm gone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wickham Posted February 27, 2009 Report Share Posted February 27, 2009 Which brings us full-circle, back to the same old question: "Does size matter..... or doesn't it???" What do you tell your husband? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSW Posted February 27, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 27, 2009 Now-a-days, the only size that matters is the size of your bank account and wallet... which is to small in most cases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tpattison Posted February 28, 2009 Report Share Posted February 28, 2009 Fantastic post there, Kyle! People think that we're not advancing far in terms of space exploration at the moment. 30 years ago, we thought that we would all be having holidays on the moon and exploring the solar system by now, after all we landed on the moon in the late 60's! But the opposite is true with electronics and computer technology; was it Bill Gates that said that "640k is enough for anyone"... Funny how things turn out! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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