Looking Back At Technology

Posted on February 26, 2009
Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment

I recently bought a USB data storage device, and was astonished at the range of devices on offer and the capacity that was available to me for such a small price. I’m a regular computer user but I wouldn’t describe myself as a geek, that is, I don’t browse magazines and catalogues looking at hardware and I don’t really understand how computers work, I just know that they do work, and that’s enough for me.

I’m also old enough to remember a time when there were no home computers, just. When I was about 8 Atari launched the Video Computer System. I remember being at a cousin’s house one Christmas and being in thrall to the sight of a small line being hit by a dot on the TV screen over and over; simple pleasures indeed.

Shortly after that I did get my first computer, a Sinclair Spectrum 48k. 48K! It was one of the most incredible things I’d ever owned. I felt like Luke Skywalker sitting in the cockpit of an X-Wing Fighter every time I sat in from of it. It was the future at my fingertips. 48k seemed like the most powerful thing imaginable and I wasn’t alone. So imagine my surprise when I found, twenty five years later while looking for my first USB stick, that I could buy a data storage device with over 150,000 times the capacity of that Spectrum computer.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised, it was 25 years after all. But I couldn’t help think about how far things had come in such a short space of time. It got me thinking about my first home PC, not too long ago, just 10 years. It was a homemade effort, my uncle made it for me, it was considerably bigger than the spectrum and weighed as much as a TV (and that’s without the monitor). But it was good for the time even and with a 4GB hard drive I was able to store unlimited data . . . or so I thought.

4GB wouldn’t go far nowadays of course, I have nearly 140GB of music and the same again of video on my current computer, maybe that’s just the data I’ve accumulated over the years but I suspect that if I started with a clean slate today I could easily fill the same space in just a short time. As the capacity of data storage has become greater the amount of data to fill that space has also increased. And the ease with which we can get the data onto our machines is, well, child’s play.

As I have already said I’m not a computer geek but I do use the computer a lot, particularly for music and films, in fact I have two computers, a desktop and a laptop, which is why I found myself looking for a USB data storage device. I wanted to move data between the two machines without having to burn a CD each time, which was beginning to prove costly and wasteful.

So I decided that I’d buy something that could get a file on it the size of a film, about 1GB. Surely that would be enough. But when I looked into it I was drawn in by the spec, the offers and the sheer size of some of the data storage devices that were on offer. I looked, in some cases, like the more I could get on one of these devices the smaller it became physically.

So I opted for 8GB satisfied that unlike my Spectrum and first PC technology wouldn’t move forward so much in the next few years that I’d need to buy something bigger any time soon. HA! No sooner had I bought it than I got an email for an offer on a 64GB data storage device.

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