Field of Science

Down computer memory lane

TPP can't remember all the diverse PC storage media he has been through in just his career.  Let's see: punch cards (older than dirt), magnetic tape, 5" floppy disks, 3.25" floppy disks, zip disks (the worst ever), Bernoulli disks (still a couple in a drawer somewhere & one ancient IBM PC with a functional drive just in case - who remembers DOS commands?), CDs, thumb drives, chip memory (256 mb was considered a lot of memory). Not a pleasant trip down memory lane that, but now they have invented a nano-structured glass disk about the size of a large coin and it's got quite the memory capacity and very stable.  Those of us who've been at this for awhile have all lost some data because not all formats were as reliable as others, like zip disks that were so named because their reliability was zip, and TPP can see from where he sits 3.25" disks, still reliable, but who has a drive for one? (afore mentioned PC) So this new disk can store nearly 300 terabytes (tera- meaning a trillion or one thousand billion) and at regular conditions totally stable for 13.8 billion years, the present age of the universe. Never will you lose those emails or inane twitters again!  But where did you put the dang thing?

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