First, I'm not that old.  But that's part of the point.  Oh, I suppose I'm kind of old in the same way that 6th graders were old when you were in 3rd.  I'm old to people in their 20's and 30's now.  Middle aged to the populace at large.  But even though I'm not that old, this post is still going to have a stink of that "In my day" clinging to it.  I can't help it.

I just bought a new computer.  It is very fast.  It has a jillion giga hertz quad core processor and a terra byte hard drive.  It sounds impressive, but honestly, this computer is not any faster than all the other new computers I've bought over the years.  The software writers make sure of that.  There is an arms race going on, in case you don't know it.  As the hardware people make the computers faster, the software people conspire to slow them down.  My word processor produces words exactly as fast as my old original IBM Personal Computer used to.  The difference is that old computer just recorded what I type.  My new one not only does that, but it will collate my breakfast and tie my shoes, while spinning 18 plates in the air, all the while presenting my words to me in 3D holographic form, ala Avatar.  I don't really need that extra stuff, but I get it anyway. 

It was that terra byte that got me to thinking.  Just a little over 20 years ago, a colleagure of mind ran up to my desk, breathless, because he couldn't wait to tell me that he had just bought a new IBM personal computer, and GET THIS(!), it had a 20 Mega Byte hard drive!!!!!!  20 Mega Bytes!  You could store not only every word you'd ever written, but every word that had crossed your consciousness, even those in the foggy sleep/wake of morning. Your neighbors too! I was using a DEC PDP11 at the time that stored data on 10 inch floppies (330 KBytes!), so of course, I had to have one, and I did. I got my 20 MBytes.   Now I've got Terra bytes.  

Now mind you, though I complain, I'm no luddite.  I spend all day playing with my iPhone just like a kid.  I have a flip video camera and a YouTube account.  I've even been on ChatRoulette, although I have to admit it creeped me out so much I had to get off after 5 minutes.   But in transferring the 200 GB to the 1TB drive, I realized that I have no idea what 90% of that 200 GB is.  I mean, it's things I wrote, and imaged, and downloaded, but if you asked me to retrieve that document from 1999 that still resides somewhere in there, I probably couldn't even open it.  That is, if I could even find it.  

We long ago passed the time of the impressive comparison.  My laptop of 5 years ago had more computing power than the entire mission control during the moon landings.  Yet, it won't run Word 2010.  99% of the stuff in my 200 GB trove I'll never need to look at again.   Yet I keep it. But do I really need Terra Bytes?  It really fails to impress anymore.   Yet I know I'm going to fill it up, just like I filled up the supposedly endless byteage on my previous 200 GigaByte drive. 

Thank goodness that by the time I do, I'll be able to buy a GooglePlexByte Hard Drive.