Have I Got Memory?

200 Gigabytes Worth…


There was a time when I was always on the cutting edge of PC computer technology at work and at home.

I lived and breathed computers--it was both a hobby and a business tool. I even had a subscription to “Byte” magazine, the ultimate computer nerd magazine of the 1980’s.

I was always head computer nerd everywhere I worked, so as a result I got to make the purchase decisions and I generally had one of the fastest PC sitting on MY desk.

My tastes in computers trickled over to my home PC equipment also.

I had an 80 Mb SCSI hard drive when everyone else suffered along with 40 Meg IDE drives. I had a HP laser printer while my friends waited on noisy old Epson dot matrix printers to print their letters home to mom or “honey.”

I had a Dell notebook PC back in 1993 in the days before every other seat on an airplane featured some bored executive pounding away on the keyboard of one. I could barely get any work done because people kept stopping to ask “hey, isn’t that one of those new Dell’s?”

Darn it was fun, but it was EXPENSIVE buying a new computer every two years or so, particularly when I was spending an average of $3000 on each new platform.

Things have changed a good deal for me today, as my computer needs have been drastically reduced and my computer budget has fallen along with them. While I used to run AutoCAD every day and spend hours in Excel Spreadsheets and running custom programs that I had written, today my computer use consists primarily of writing Word Documents, editing photos in Photoshop, and surfing the internet.

I haven't read a computer magazine in years, and today I resort to invesitgating our technology needs as they arise, sort of on a "need to know" basis rather than sitting around lusting all the time over things that I don't need and/or can't justify the cost of owning.

Today I don’t really need screaming processor speed, the standard resolution of most monitors and LCD displays is more than adequate, but what I do need is LOTS of hard disk space on which to store my photographs.

The problem became critical last week when I realized that one of our machines’ hard drive was 98% full. This explained while the performance was crawling. The older laptop which I use primarily was in the same situation.

I hate to admit that I didn't have a clue what our options were, so I called my former college roommate Andy to ask for an opinion. Andy still lives on the cutting edge when it comes to information and computer technology as an executive at a division of Intergraph Corporation.

When Andy turns on his computer system, the lights in all of western North Carolina dim slightly. Andy's computer storage capacities are in the three TERRABYTE range...at HOME.

Andy suggested that as a solution to our storage woes that I forget looking at USB flash drives or replacement internal hard drives and instead consider the inexpensive USB external drives.

Saturday afternoon we wandered across the Torras Causeway--back to the real world to do some shoping. Pat went to Bed Bath and Beyond while I visited Staples and Circuit City.

When we left the parking lot on our way back home to our little island, I was so excited that I almost wet my pants.

No…I’m really not that simple minded…it’s just that I realize how amazing it is today when it comes to where we are with computer hardware.

We paid the clerk at Staples for a Maxtor 200 Gigabyte USB Drive ($119.00 plus tax), brought our purchase home, opened the package, plugged it into the computer’s USB port, plugged the AC adapter into the wall, rebooted the computer and….

instead of 40 Gig, Pat’s little Dell computer now had 240 Gig!

No driver installation from floppy disks or CD’s.

No special extra cost cabling or adapters.

No extra trips to the computer store

No e-mails to support websites.

No phone calls to tech support.

No bitching and complaining and shouting and scratching my head and/or ass, wondering what I’d done wrong.

There weren’t even any instructions in the packaging—just a reference to a website to answer questions to anyone unlucky enough to not know which end of an AC adaptor to plug into the wall outlet.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING HERE?

I guess maybe not--particularly if you are under the age of 35. Let me tell you kids something…things haven’t always been this way.

I remember back about 1985 when I managed to talk my boss into letting me buy a new hard drive for my IBM PC-XT.

You see, the old PC-XT’s originally came with a giant…get ready…10 megabyte hard drive.

My co-workers used to hang around my desk and gawk in envy because I didn’t need a stack of floppy disks to run spell check on Wordstar.

We paid nearly $300, as I recall, to double my capacity to 20 meg, and I had to replace the existing 10 meg drive to do it because “half height” drives hadn’t been invented yet and the old PC-XT chassis only had two drive bays—we needed to save one bay for a 5-1/4” floppy drive in order to install new programs and exchange data with other users on floppies.

Back then, adding or replacing a hard disk involved…gasp…OPENING UP THE CABINET of the PC, exposing sensitive things like the power supply and “mother board.” Then there was the inevitable extra trip back to the computer store to buy the cable that you really needed rather than the cable that they already sold you or that came with the new hard drive.

As I said earlier, today you plug the darn things in, turn them on, and start computing.

How easy is that?

Also, consider this statistic. Two Hundred Gigabytes in my new drive is 10,000 times larger than the 20 Megabyte capacity of that first drive that I installed 21 years ago.

Ten thousand times the storage capacity for less than half the 1985 price…

Sorry, but I'm still excited and I’ve got to go pee now…

(then I'm going to save some new pictures on our new hard drive)