A friend sent me a link to this photo that demonstrates Moore’s Law. For those of you that don’t know what that is and are unwilling to click the link and read about it yourself, Moore’s Law states that “the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every 18 months.” The big drum-like device in the picture is what it took to store 1 gigabyte 20 years ago, and the little compact flash card that the hand is holding is 1 gigabyte today (well, I guess it’s been like that for a couple of years now — you can now find cards of the same size that hold 16 gigabytes).

This picture reminded me of the first hard drive that I owed, purchased for my new Mac Plus in 1989. It was 20 megabytes (not gigabytes — a megabyte is roughly 1/1000 of a gigabyte) and was about 18 inches x 18 inches x 5 inches in size. Having been programming computers without hard drives for years before that purchase I remember thinking to myself, “I’ll never fill that up.” Of course, 8 months later I was having to delete things off the drive (mostly games) to make room for more term papers. Ah, the good old days.

Compare this with today. I have a RAID5 network-attached storage device (basically, a big hard drive connected to my network rather than a single computer) that has 1.5 terabytes of storage (a terabyte is roughly 1000 gigabytes or approximately 1,000,000 megabytes). Of course, when I bought this device, I avoided the hubris of thinking that I’d never need more space. We’ve already filled half of it.