With the imminent arrival of my new phone (finally), I needed to get a new microSD card for it.
These things still amaze me. 32GB of data on something half the size of my fingertip.
Cue the Hovis ad music[1]…
Now, when I were a lad, my first computer was a ZX Spectrum, with a quite frankly astonishing 48Kb of memory. This was some time ago, admittedly, and was a HUGE step up from the mighty ZX81, with a whole kilobyte of RAM.
My first PC, some ten years later[2], came with a whopping 4Mb of RAM, and an astonishing 100Mb hard drive. What could you possibly put in that amount of space? Ridiculous.
And now, we’re talking gigabytes on your fingertip. The MicroSD card format is so tiny it’s absurd. I’m not sure you could go any smaller and still have it be actually usable.
I wonder where we’ll be in another ten years. Past the days of physical memory, no doubt. Everything will be online, all the time.
Which will bring the added advantage of not having to try and open those cursed plastic blister packs…
[1] which probably ages me pretty well.
[2] and, depressingly, twenty years ago…