3rd October 2012

More than my old hard drive

My first computer had a hard disk of 640MB and a RAM of 8MB. In less than 20 years, the MBs have been replaced by GB. A standard laptop now has 500GB hard disk and 8GB of RAM. Makes your head spin. This tiny thing can hold upto 25 hard disks of my old computer. Back then we used to work with Corel Draw and that came with a few disks including a disk for fonts and one for clipart. When we needed to use clipart, we used to put the CD in the drive and copy the clipart we needed. Someone in my office suggested why we don't just copy the data of the CD on the hard disk to save the inconvenience of using a CD every time a graphic was required, and did we made fun of her? We really laughed our asses off.

Now the question is "is all this extra storage enough?" By no means, of course there are things like saving movies, images and songs on hard disks which we never did earlier but most of the extra space has been taken by the software companies. I remember installing software like Photoshop and Illustrator from floppy disk drives. A set of 4-5 1.44 MB disks were all what we needed for the exe. Compare that to the bloated installation files now. The work we were doing was similar which required similar processing, actually in my case, it requires significantly less processing power as I am now working on files with much smaller resolution of web compared to print but still the speed of my computer has not increased even a small fraction of the size.

You tell me, you also have been consistently upgrading your PC and have seen the size of storage increase exponentially. Do you think now you have more space to store data or a faster computer than you had some years ago.