I remember when the Commodore 64 was state of the art.
It’s an early 80’s thing, when I was in junior high going into high school. I was envious of friends whose families had shelled out the $500 or so. Loaded with BASIC, these powerhouses had 64 kilobytes in memory, or 64,000 bytes, one byte being about enough to store one character of text.
My camera today has a chip that holds a gigabyte of memory, or 1,000,000,000, a billion, bytes, equal to about 15,625 Commodore 64s in memory.
Computer technology sure is growing fast.
I don’t understand it, but my brother Dan does ? he works with Intel in California.
He says terabyte chips, which holds 1,000 times more memory than my digital camera’s (1,000,000,000,000, a trillion, bytes) are almost here, and they’re working on petra, or peta, byte chips. These would hold a thousand terabytes, million gigabytes, quadrillion bytes, AKA 1,000,000,000,000,000, or more than 15 billion Commodore 64s.
No matter how much memory these things will hold, people will always fill them.
My wife got what seemed to be a state-of-the-art iPod a couple months ago with a 2 gig chip, enough for 500 songs. They’re advertising 80 gig iPods now ? some say they’ve already filled them with songs.
We will soon have iPods that hold 1,000 full-length movies.
The human brain is still being studied, but some figures I’ve seen range from about 10 trillion to 100 pentillion (a ‘one? followed by 20 zeros) bytes in memory, long-term, short-term, and procedural ? about 10-100,000 petabytes.
Chip makers should be able to match that in a couple months.
***
Watched the Grammy’s this past Sunday.
Despite, or because, of the controversy four years ago about lead singer Natalie Maines? negative comments against President Buch, The Dixie Chicks did very well.
Their ‘Not Ready to Make Nice? album won a bunch of awards, including Album of the Year. Upon hearing of their victory and vindication, group members Maines, Martie Maguire, and Emily Robison got up, strode to the microphone, and … made nice.
They thanked all their friends and supporters. They said they were honored. They said they had no regrets.
The closest they came to not being nice was when Natalie quoted Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons, ‘haw haw!?
Not the height of angry rhetoric.
I was a bit miffed in 2003 when Maines made her opinion known to a bunch of foreigners in England.
Others were more put out ? they boycotted their music, destroyed CDs, made death threats.
The Chicks didn’t deserve that, and they won me back with their ‘Nice? album.
They have the right to their opinions.
They’re probably not even that strong ? they’re likely too busy with their music to worry about politics one way or the other.