Today’s post is not Moodle related (for a change) but rather highlighting the constant miniaturization of technology and it’s ability to make me feel incredibly old when talking to students.
Now I have to admit that I m in fact only 32. I came just after the day of punchcards and into the early days of the modern computing era. My earliest memory of a PC was an Apple II in my primary school computing lab. I then became obsessed with technology and over the years played with many of the early “toys” including BBC Micro’s, early Amiga’s and my favourite Mac Classic (Which still works like the day I bought it).
On the right of this page is a photo demonstrating the miniaturization of storage over the years. On the top is the IBM 3380. This was the first 1GB drive ever created and it was not that long ago, it was created in 1980. The beast weighed 250 kg and cost US$142,000. Underneath is a series of SD cards, the smallest being the microSD standard. These were first released in 2002 and a 1GB card today will put you back US$11. In fact, just to add insult to injury SanDisk announced in January this year that they are releasing a 12GB card this year!
If you feel like your own walk down memory lane, I recommend checking out Royal Pingdom’s great article on computer storage over the years. The memories will come flooding back. 
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This post is tagged memory lane, old, storage
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My first job as an undergraduate was keypunch operator (machine language code came through once in a while; that was a challenge to enter and proofread!). I walked into the mainframe room at the university–40 degrees, a billion miles of cable under the floor, and racks and racks of magnetic tape–and I was fascinated. But what really hooked me was chatting via teletype with the other operators late at night. Our greatest nightmare was to drop a box of cards and have to reassemble them to load in the hopper. I was the first person at our university to take qualifying exams on a computer (an Osborne!), and the second to do a dissertation on a wordprocessor. You are quite right–we have come a long way in the last 25 years.
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