I was getting ready for meeting with students today, getting out of the ragged summer clothes into slightly more formal apparel, when I noticed something I take for granted: my pocket data. You’ve all got that, right? That little collection of tiny flash drives that you have handy for on the fly data transfers? I tallied mine up.
In my pocket I have a 256GB USB device.
I also have a card wallet with:
- 3 64Gb SD cards
- 2 64GB micro SD cards
- 1 128GB SD card
- 1 16GB SD card (it came with my camera)
That’s a total of 720GB just jingling like pocket change as a I walk around. I don’t keep anything particularly valuable on any of them, they’re mostly there in case I need to shuffle around some video or images or a class presentation — all the valuable stuff is on the home computer storage (500GB internal ss drive, a 4TB and 2TB external drive) and backed up in a few places.
But it got me thinking how insanely rich I am with data storage…and some of you might have more. When I got my first home computer back in 1979, we measured everything in K, and floppies didn’t fit in your pocket. Then in the late 80s, it went up to M — my first hard drive (don’t ask how much it cost) had a 5 megabyte capacity, and I was stunned with the amount of space I had. Now everything is in Gs, with a few Ts in there, and eventually we’ll all be hauling multiple terabytes of casual storage around.
What are we going to do with it all?
SD cards don’t actually jingle.
Just think how much data is sitting in data centres on servers humming away, burning up electricity.
It’s increasing exponentially, and who is getting rid of the redundant stuff ? Perhaps the plant will end up buried in data centres!
I have a portable SSD with 500GB on it, but I don’t usually take it away from my desk. For years I’ve been joking that someone would lose a terabyte, and everyone would have to search for it like they used to do for a lost contact lens. Now that you can fit a TB on a card the size of my fingernail, I don’t think that’s a joke anymore.
I still have a shoebox of punched paper tape down at my parents’ house. I know each tape is less than 4k because the computer had 8k, 4k of which was the interpreter and there was a max of 4k for the programmer to play with. In those days we had an excuse for not commenting code – it took memory. Also it was hard to make a good mistake in 4k. Nowadays code can be bigger and more complicated than the people writing the code can understand – or as Ken Thompson said “If you are writing code at the limit of your ability, you are writing code you cannot possibly debug.”
There’s a great book entitled Mechanizing Proof about how “software engineering” happened. It includes the fascinating story of a conference in the 50s where the folks who were inventing computer science realized what Ken Thompson later said.
At one company where I worked we used a unit of measure called “a Mumford”, which was defined as: “the amount of storage you can get for $200” – since our product included data space, we measured by budget not size.
I’ve got an old DECtape sitting in a box in my office. I’d have to think to figure out its capacity — 184K of 12 bit words?
I don’t have any way to read it anymore. My PhD thesis is on there, though.
Basic rule of nature I think, Data expands to fill the space available.
For me, I have 3 one or two terabyte drives hooked to my MacBook, and about 5 or 6 128 mb to 1gb USB flash drives in a small drawer under my desk. That doesn’t include all the USB drive enclosures I use with my old hard drives, just in case I need the data from years ago. Then there’s all the old CD’s and DVD’s I used in the past to use as long term storage.
And now Amazon Web Services has a dirt cheap S3 “Glacier” option for very long term storage.
At some point I need to go over all our old data and do some mass deleting. With the way it is going we are drowning in data.
Speaking of old data storage, I still have the punch cards from my first major experiment. It contains the JCL commands, SAS stats directives and the data. I used to have nightmares when working on it of walking to the Computer center and tripping, scattering the cards everywhere. I really ought to find some way of moving that data to a stick.
Plenty of storage around my desk (not least because I use a fair number of Raspberry Pis and they use micro-SD cards for boot devices), but I don’t routinely carry data storage devices with me.
Thankfully I have now returned to the days when I produce only a few Ks of worthwhile data a day, not something in the Gs. It’s a megaweight off my mind.
Except…take one photo on my camera, that’s about 5M right there.
What will we do with it? Since software is actually a gas, and expands to fill the available volume…
I carry a 32GB encrypted volume with me for my SSH private keys and other miscellany that require tighter security.
I tried jingling around an SD card with some change, SD card did not like, Embarrassed to say it’s only ~8GB excluding my phone.
I am a https://syncthing.net fan, synchronizes files magically, all i do is make sure they’re already synchronized before i alter files, so there are no conflicts. (but then conflicts just show up as files showing the alternative, which you can use to resolve them)
I usually carry only the storage on my phone with me, or one or more memory cards for the camera (not then one in my phone) when I’m out to shoot something.
Got a few USB drives of different age and capacity in case I know I have to carry some data. Not sure how many exactly are lurking in the depth of my desk, I’m happy to find one when I need it.
The earliest commercial CD-ROM I can remember reading about was a sample library for the Emu Emulator II sampling keyboard. A company called OMI marketed a 2 CD ROM collection of their Universe of Sounds samples, which originally came on a huge pile of .5.25 inch floppies.. The CD ROM drive itself was something called the CDS3. I remember the cost as being pretty steep even in 1986 dollars, and you needed to spend money on a Mac to make it really usable. But if you were a pro musician, especially a session player, the greatly increased speed and ease of sample loading no doubt seemed worth the cost. A version was already out with a single 20 MB hard drive on board, and that cost an additional 3 grand on top of the 7 grand a basic Emulator II cost. And this was still cheaper and a bit easier to transport than buying a Fairlight CMI or a New England Digital Synclavier digital music system.
Oh yeah, while I’m not old enough to have worked with punch cards, I do remember the KB days. When I first heard of GB hard discs for PCs, I thought I’d never be able to fill one of these with my stuff…
This stakes me back. I started on card decks. I thought I didn’t have much memory with me now, but when I checked, I see I have three USBs totaling about 256 GB. Then there’s the 256 GB on my phone and 64 GB in my camera. It does add up. My first laptop had 4 KB RAM and 4 MB memory. It seemed vast at the time.
Way way back when, my morning routine was to come up the elevator to my floor, go through the computer lab, pop out the Exabyte tape with last night’s backups, put it on its rack in my office and get tonight’s tape, and put in the new tape the next time I happened to be in the lab.
One day, I got distracted or something, and found myself going to lunch with the 5Gb tape still in my coat pocket. Next to me in the elevator was an operator with a cart loaded with two dozen or so 9-track tapes, each about the size of an LP and half an inch thick in its protective case.
I did some quick math in my head, and was amused to note that I had more data in my pocket than that guy did on his cart.
timgueguen, #16:
Yep. Now you can just get many gigabytes of VSTs for free and do so much more.
At least that’s not $13,000 (!!) for the “high-end” system* that this Hybrid Arts guy is trying to advertise on the old PBS show Computer Chronicles in 1986. And to my 2022 eyes, it looks like it doesn’t do shit.
*Better than $300,000 (!!!) I guess….
Marcus Ranum @4:
That takes me back. I once wrote a PDP-8 emulator that ran on a PDP-8 (yes, really, and I still have the paper tape to prove it). You could enter a simple program on the KSR-35 keyboard, and it would run the
program and print the contents of each register on each edge of the clock in each of the major states. (I was mostly a wires-and-pliers guy back then; but I learned to enjoy programming because of the fun I had on the PDP-8. I still remember the PDP-8 machine language.)
PZ @6:
Those were pretty spiffy in their day. It was fun watching a randon access tape drive shuttle back and forth.
What was my first program? I really can’t remember. Does an 029 drum card count as a program?
Proofread fail @21 “random”, not “randon”.
Ugh… I lost track of how many flash drives I own or even what’s on most of them. These days I mainly use a 64 gig stick that can also connect to my iOS devices in case I need to transfer files to or from my phone or iPad to another device.
I also have a couple of microSD cards that I use with my 3D printer. I used to have Octoprint so I could wireless send sliced files to my printer, but the Raspberry Pi it was running on seems to have gone pfffffffft and I haven’t found the time to replace it.
Everything is, if you’re willing to overlook all the bugs like a true programmer.
The only data I transport is on my phone and my watch. I assume my car’s key fob carries some data…perhaps about as much as the Apollo 11 command module…but that’s a black box, and the car itself has onboard data. I also have some chips on credit/debit cards. I have a 32GB USB device but I rarely use it. Most of the data I use for work and personal business is “in the cloud”, so fortunately I don’t need to do a lot of data transfer.
When I was in junior college studying Electronics Technology, the department acquired a hobbyist computer of some type. I don’t remember the make or model, but it had a BASIC interpreter and an audio cassette deck for storage. It wasn’t used as part of the curriculum, at least not while I was there, but we students were allowed to mess around with it. I created a text version of Mastermind that was a lot of fun to play with.
Also, we had little Intel 8080 based prototyping boards with 7 segment LED displays and a breadboard so you could add extra components. I added a 555 timer chip and an op-amp and dinked around with 8080 machine code to make an analog to digital converter. That was fun too, even though it had no non-volatile memory, so I had to key in my code every time I turned it on.
moarscienceplz @27:
Could it have been a TI-99/4? Back in the late 70s, I was working at Allegheny General Hospital building an EKG machine with a microprocessor in it…a TMS9900, the same chip that was in the TI-99/4. I still remember that one’s machine language, too.
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You don’t have to be Fellini to figure out this ad photo.
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This takes me back to the good old days! Specifically: high school math in the 90s, when we used TI-83s and -89s and our teacher liked to point out that we were each carrying around more computing power than Apollo XI. . .
#21: Back in the late 70s, I did some programming for a physiology lab on a PDP-11 running RSX. That one was a shock to me, used to just running one program at a time in a linear fashion. I’d tell it to do something complicated, and it would immediately bounce back with a command prompt. I thought something was wrong, but it was dutifully executing whatever, and letting me tell it what to do while it was processing. So I could sit there queuing up a dozen commands, and it would just do them all simultaneously. That took a while to get used to, and debugging gave me headaches because suddenly synchronizing everything was a major issue.
It was fun, though! It wasn’t too challenging, either, since all I had to do was tell it to collect simultaneous data from a dozen different electrodes and dump it all in a bin to sort out later, and that’s exactly what the OS was designed to do.
PZ, yes, I remember it well. Back when I was building the EKG for Allegheny General in Pittsburgh, we had a PDP-11/60 running RSX-11M. We also had an operating system called MUMPS, one of the Ms standing for “medical”. (I don’t remember the rest and I’m too lazy to look it up.) It had a Fortran IV compiler which I used to write a disassembler for TMS9900 code.
It was going to be used to process the data from my machine which could store up to five EKGs on a cassette tape. I built a high-speed UART that plugged into the 11/60’s backplane to facility the reasonably rapid transfer of all that data.
My immediate boss, a recent PhD from Carnegie Mellon, basically left me alone and allowed me to achieve whatever I could. That was probably my best job ever.
Proofread fail again (hangs head in shame): “facilitate”, not “facility”.
I have a kilobyte of core memory I pulled out of the trash. It’s a 2″x2″ card plugin with a fine wire grid on each side threaded with tiny little magnetic cores and a write line threaded zigzag through all of them.
Also when I started work in disk drives I got this poster with three diskdrive racks (pointed at by a Vanna White-esque woman in a knee-length business dress) which replaced this whole wall of racks. For the next fifteen years, I updated the poster as densities increased until the same capacity could be put on a single 1 inch drive, disk units became a commodity and the business was sold off. Capacity doubled every year. The amount of disk storage on those three racks: 90GB.
When I in junior high, I got hooked to this “teach kids computers” program. We did fortran by teletype to some IBM machine. We of course wrote banner programs to write big punched letters like a news crawl onto the paper tape writer. We used the same fortran book (same cover too) as the one stolen from the Whites-only library by the Octavia Spencer character in “Hidden Figures.”
About 1990, I gave a talk at U Alabama Tuscaloosa on disk magnetics to their grad students. Their big research focus was on floppy disks since there were floppy disk plants on the edge of town. Floppies died soon after. I always wondered what happened to those grad students. One hopes they moved on to other things but not a great resume item.
All the data I walk around with is contained within my head. I have nothing to plug into. No phones, no devices. Just this PC.
Okay… If we’re going to discuss old hardware, I have a quote. This is from “Space Frontier”, a collection essays that first appeared in Popular Science, written by Werner von Braun. The specific essay in question is “Tiny Computers Steer the Mightiest Rockets.” It concerns the guidance computer for the Saturn V…
Anyone care to try to put that in their pocket?
As Charles Stross was one of the first to point out, data storage is getting cheaper so fast there is little point in purging old stuff. The historians of the future will be wading in trivia.
.
One annoying aspect of the rapid obsolence of digital media is, I hardly had time to adjust to the disappearence of VHS tapes until it was time to dump DVDs for blue-ray (I am a technophobe – I am afraid of learning new stuff because I need så much time learning it) .
Somebody needs to point out that the problem goes back quite a long way.
— Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
(He predicted that we’d soon all have microfilm readers in our desks. 8-) My best guess is that I have no clue what’s to come, even in the next decade.)
I carry zero data with me.
birgerjohansson @37,
Still early days of the computer age.
More likely they will be ruing the paucity of data in these primitive times, as we ourselves do about even more primitive times.
I have the data in my brain? The IO rate is slow and the memory is faulty. But it is mine, and because of the connectivity it does well when encountering the major environmental factor in my survival: other people.
Just my phones – one work, one private, 64GB internal storage each. I used to stick microSD cards into every phone, but I don’t see the need anymore.
I’ve had a few USB memory sticks just up and die on me, enough that I don’t quite trust them for anything important/long-term.
But then, I recently dug out some old stuff and found one I picked up about 20 years back, when I was enlisted and stationed in Okinawa, and it still works. I think it’s only ~128 MB or so, which is kinda ridiculous today, but it’s enough to transfer a document to a printer every now and then, and I’m just kinda impressed that it still works.
(semi related, fuck you, to my old enlisted roommate who gave me shit for getting a 20G MP3 player, because “minidiscs(?)” were clearly the future tech)
What kind of antique devices are you interacting with that you still need move data around on physical media? Physical media is for offline backup, not data transfer (unless you have very large amounts of data to move). The only thing I’ve got that still needs a physical connection to get data off it is my old Nikon D3400… I have a USB key on my key ring, but it’s only for holding an emergency offline backup of my KeePass database (along with the executable to read it), and I don’t even remember what capacity the device has.
I started with punch cards … I think I still have one around somewhere. The first computer I programmed was an IBM 1620 with 20,000 digits of binary coded decimal (6 bits each: 4 for the digit, a flag bit, and a parity bit; bits were implemented with ferrite cores). The first disk drive I bought, for the Amiga 1000, was 50 MB … it cost $1000. Now, all told I have about 15 TB of storage but little of it is in use. Most of what is active resides in my Dropbox account that I can call up on my desktop, laptop, phone, or anywhere I have a signal.
This fellow may have a working PDP-8 and tape drive: http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/
Dave Cutler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler), the guy who designed RSX-11M, later designed Windows NT which still basically is what today’s Windows 11 is. When I met him he was quite a character, came across as very working class, not like the usual DEC or IBM suits.
Nope: Massachusetts [General Hospital] Utility Multi-Programming System. I ran across it when I worked in the oncology department at the USC/LA County Medical Center, though I never programmed in it (we had a Varian 620F programmed in assembler and FORTRAN that we used for patient records and to control the positioning of the Varian Linear Accelerator that radiated cancer patients). I’ve seen MUMPS described as the worse programming language ever devised (not including intentionally difficult languages like Brainfuck and Befunge).
He was a very big deal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush). I hadn’t realized that “he initiated the Manhattan Project” … where my parents met (she was a cryptographic typist; he was the head of cryptographic typewriter repair). I owe my life to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of others, I suppose.
Jim Balter @48: thanks for the correction. My (possibly false) memory is that it was an O/S, not a programming language; but I never used it.
Re: Jim Balter @ #45…
IBM 1620 Mod. I or Mod. II?
The one I learned to program on was a Mod. I that had been considerably upgraded. 80K digits of memory and a 2MB per (removable) pack disk drive. Hence the use of SPS IID and FORTRAN IID.
@billseymour #28
No, I had just finished a summer job at TI in Dallas. Had it been a TI product I’m sure I would have remembered.
However, what I did that summer was run automated testers for the printed circuit boards (or ‘printed wiring boards’ as TI and nobody else in the world called them) for a marine navigation system that had a uProcessor with a huge white ceramic DIP package. I’m pretty sure it must have been a TMS9900.
@ John Morales #39
“I carry zero data with me.”
Really? That’s amazing! Even ignoring my cellphone, in my wallet I have a drivers license with a multiline barcode that holds all the info printed on the front, I have my medical plan card with a barcode, several member cards for various stores with barcodes or mag stripes, and credit cards stuffed with chips for inserting into or tapping onto POS terminals.
“SD cards don’t actually jingle.”
They klinkle though.
” I used to have nightmares when working on it of walking to the Computer center and tripping, scattering the cards everywhere.”
I did that with my finished version of the knight’s tour program written in Fortran. No ink in the punchcard machines so no doco on the cards. Nightmare come true.
Fortunately I had it all written down on coding sheets and it got rebuilt from scratch in about 3 hours.
I have 1x 1T stick.
4 x1T external drives
2 x2T external backup drives.
256gb on my phone.
I rember writing a Star Trek game in basic in 4k.
Anyone want to come to Brisbane for a “rember when” party?
moarscienceplz,
If and when I need any of those things, I carry them. Otherwise, no.
But then, I’m not normal.
I last had a wallet around thirty years ago. Now, if I think I’ll be spending any money, I have my money pouch with a couple of folded bills and some change, or I carry a credit card. No bulging pockets for me.
(And, of course, I live in Oz, so I don’t have to carry ID walking down the street)