Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Future.

It's weird how sometimes the future reminds you it's here.

I was just gathering some images off my phone to use in a blog post by emailing them to myself. (Easier than cabling up to my Wintel laptop. If I had dough, I'd just get a Mac laptop or an iMac and not have to worry about this.)

Anyhow, the phone asks what size I want the images to be, and I casually send them in full resolution. This sends five pictures, totaling 7.1MB in size, whizzing through the ether to be boomeranged back down the DSL line to the router and back to my waiting laptop.

The entire hard disc drive storage capacity of the full-height Seagate on my first PC-XT was 10MB.

If I had comments on, the third commenter would point out that their first computer didn't even have a hard drive. I would respond frustratedly, pointing out that I'd said "my first PC-XT" and not "my first computer". The fifth commenter would proclaim that they had first programmed DEC mainframes using punch cards made from dinosaur toenails or something. Slide rules would make their appearance by comment ten.