Time Flies
CNN noted the 25th anniversary of the CD yesterday. Man oh man - it was 1982, and I was still reeling from the magic of a dual 5 1/4 inch floppy disk we had for my Commodore PET at school. That was a cool floppy drive because it was powered by a 6502 just like the PET, and the uber nerd (ahem) could program it turn it's activity light on and off and spin its motor like a some kind of possessed disco ball. A year later, I blew most of my savings from my summer job loading and unloading boxes in a warehouse on a CD player. Two years after I bought my CD player, I was working as a programmer for the Bank of Montreal, and we were all abuzz about our new GIGABYTE!! IBM DASD ("Direct Access Storage Device" - aka hard disk) - and only the size of a refrigerator and only cost about $100,000.
Now it is 2007, they're shoving 50 gigabytes onto the same size disc as that first CD, there are terabyte drives for 400 bucks, and you can get a gigabyte in something that weighs as much as a frickin' M&M for nine bucks. Time flies.