So… in making the rounds today I went off to Photobucket to view the full size version of one of Abe’s fabulous photos and was startled to see Photobucket has over five and a half billion images hosted on its site. That’s billion! Think of the storage required to host that many photos, and Photobucket’s service is free… which boggles MY mind, if no one else’s. If one can believe the counter in the lower left of the screen, people are uploading over 1,000 photos per minute to Photobucket. Simply amazing. One wonders how much disc space Google, Flickr, and other video/photo hosting sites use, eh? And how long can this sort of thing continue, free of charge? Dang, but these here inter-tubes are amazing, eh?
The pic is of a 1987-vintage IBM direct-access storage device (DASD), which could store 1.26 billion characters, and it was considered to be cost-effective at the time. I've been in data centers where there were literally row upon row upon row of these devices in a room that rivaled a football field in size. One wonders what disc farms look like these days.
It's amazing how much smaller and cheaper technology has gotten. 10 years ago I bought a PC with 4GB hard drive and 64RAM, and I thought I would NEVER use it all!! LOL!
ReplyDeletewell, it does boggle my mind! hows all this all gonna turn out I wonder??
ReplyDeleteIt is amazing! Free is good. I often wonder why it is all free. Free picture hosting, blog hosting, ect.
ReplyDeleteIt really is amazing. We have the blade server which I would nominate as the "heavy lifter" in miniaturization over the last few years. There are (hope this doesn't cause topic drift) "green" initiatives which are going to provide private and public funding to shrink things even more. And, of course, take credit for it after the job is done, nevermind how much things shrank before Al's "earth in the lurch" book" ever rolled off the press.
ReplyDeleteWhen I got into this business, I used to giggle at the old farts who said their old-fart things like "back in my day, we used reel to reel tape and you needed a whole spool to store blah blah blah." But even while I was chortling, I was putting 50 GB in an optical jukebox about the size of the equipment in the picture -- a shrinkage factor of 40 that took place over the five years after the picture was taken (this was '92, during that year in Detroit).
You know what that means doncha. Welcome to old fart-hood, Morgan. I'm just one more old guy with a receding hairline and real boring geek stories to tell. People will buy me drinks to get me to stop telling 'em...I'm not the first and I won't be the last...
Five and a half billion? I don't even know what that means.
ReplyDeleteWOW! Boggles my little mind.
ReplyDeleteThe things you think of, Buck! I would say it boggles my mind, but I just don't go there. Is that a "woman thing"?
ReplyDelete"... a room that rivaled a football field in size." Good usage! I commend you, sir!
ReplyDelete(Nobody else will understand what in hell I'm talking about, but you do, and I thank you.)
Jenny: I'm gonna pretend I'm Morgan (an old geezer with war stories) and just mention my first computer... a dual-floppy drive IBM XT. I installed a 10MB (that's ten megabytes) hard drive on that thing and thought I was just the coolest dude, ever.
ReplyDeleteDawn: I'm wondering the same thing, especially about the retention time for all this stuff we're uploading to various places.
Ash: Supposedly all these ads you see on these sites (but 97% of most people never click on) are supposed to pay the rent. I kinda doubt it.
Morgan: Hear, hear! I'm sure we have a lot of similar war stories, but you'd be surprised at how many people actually like to exchange those hoary tales. Or maybe it's just us Ol' Farts, eh? ;-)
Amy sez: Five and a half billion? I don't even know what that means.
It IS hard to get your head around numbers that size. Normal people don't have a billion of anything, with the exception of bytes on their 'puters...
Diva: Me, too...which is why I posted. And Lord only knows what YouTube's storage requirements are...
Lou: Which woman thing are you thinking of? The fact you don't use the term "boggle" or that most women aren't impressed with geeky stuff? Or something else altogether?
Jim: I always try to emulate my superiors, ya know. ;-)
You're welcome!
Geeky stuff can be very impressive - such as how such small things can hold so much info - definitely mind boggling. But I think it is a woman thing to not want to think about it; we just want it to work.
ReplyDeleteWhat was it that your old AOL profile said? Maybe regarding your computer equipment? (Does AOL still have that field in its profiles?)
ReplyDelete"Started out with water-cooled, then it got weird ..." or something like that, wasn't it?
We've lived during some AMAZING times, that's fer sure! I figure that, at some point, we'll simply be able to WILL our electronic needs into being. : )
Ah... thanks for the clarification, Lou. A LOT of guys are like that, too: they just want stuff to work and couldn't care less about how or why it works...
ReplyDeleteLori, your memory simply amazes me! Yeah, AOL used to have a "computer" or "computers used" field in their profiles, and you're right... my "computer" entry said almost exactly that... something to that effect, anyway. It definitely had both those elements in there (water-cooled and things getting weird).
We DO live in the most amazing times. It might be a toss-up between our parents generation and ours as to whose times were more amazing... my Dad was fond of going on about how the war (WW II) and airplanes changed everything. But I think OUR times are more amazing... Dad didn't see the Digital Age come to fruition, and perhaps we haven't yet, either. God only knows what else is coming. Like you say, maybe we'll be able to WILL our needs/desires into being!