Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Solid State Disk
We got delivery of a solid state disk today... 80GB in size and on board, I counted only 24 large memory chips and another one with a large heat sink. Read more about it here.

This is an amazing piece of technology! Simply unthinkable! I can always remember when I was studying in UK back in the mid 70's. At that time, we are talking about assembly language programming, 8-bit CPU, and mini computer with 8KB memory, and mainframe computer with just 16KB RAM. Also, there was no graphical stuff. The best and most famous game was the lunar lander where we all tried to land the Apollo spacecraft on the surface of the moon.
When we talked about memory address space, we were talking about 16-bit (64KB) and 32 bits maximum. Beyond that, it was unthinkable. Now, we are talking about 64-bit address space. Oh... it was difficult to comprehend that sort of space at that time. No one will ever need such an address space. But reality came faster than we thought. We need it now and we are using that now.
Oh, I forgot, that card above cost RM9000!

In fact, when we bought the first personal hard disk in the mid 80's, it was 100MB and costing RM1000. I thought to myself, I could never finish filling up the space! Now, we are talking about 1TB for personal use. Cost? Probably about RM500.

1 comment:

Kong said...

Moral of the story: Never say never.