I was sitting in the whirlpool at the gym today, grousing over the fact that for all the places selling digital media no one offers a miniSD card – lots of CF, SD, MMC, xD, and Media Sticks though – and had an enigma pop into my head: how did I get here?

Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start. The first computer that I owned was a Commodore Vic-20. Total memory? A standard offering of 5000 bytes (5KB). After that I switched to a Commodore 64 which offered a sweet bank of 64KB, offering you 38911 bytes as available. I stuck with the C64 for a while, but eventually entered the world of IBM-Clones with a CompuAdd 810 which was an XT based machine – running at 4.77/8/10MHz – which offered about 640KB. I’m pretty sure it was 640KB. I remember being cranky that I had jumped ahead 10 times the RAM, yet I didn’t have a graphical UI like GEOS.

Once I switched to IBM compatibles, I stuck with them, and a rather long stretch of upgrades started. Monochrome gave way to EGA, VGA, XGA, SVGA+, and so on. Keyboards added more keys. Mice were added and then replaced by trackballs. CPU’s went from 286 then 386SX to 486DX2 (yep, I skipped 386DX, 486SX, and 486DX) to Pentium 1 through 4. Hard drives were first coveted, then bought at great expense, the upgraded when good rebates were available, and have completed the transition into coasters.

The thing that sparked my mental hiccup was that of memory. Speed bumps aren’t as shocking to me.. After all, Apple has just broken the 2GHz barrier and Intel’s numbers have always been skewed by class – for example a 386SX/25MHz would get lapped many times over by a 486DX/25MHz. In a sense, the MHz/GHz speed has always been relative. Storage has no such skewing values… a byte is 8 bits. 1000 bytes make a kilobyte. It’s pretty fixed standard to compare values by.

What boggled my mind was that the first computer I owned – which had no hard drive! – had 5KB of RAM. My current computer has 512MB of RAM. 512,000KB In a span of 20 years, it’s jumped 100,000 times. But then I got to thinking about storage. Since the Vic-20 was stuck with floppies, it stored 360KB on one side of a 5.25″ floppy disk. My digital camera has a 1.5″ square of Compact Flash memory… and it stores 128MB. I’m pretty sure I had a 20MB hard drive by 1994. In 2004, my phone has 64MB of RAM and I’m concerned enough about that that I want to add an additional set of memory with a miniSD card… which should be another 64MB… and is smaller than a stamp.

The kicker to it all is that I have a currently have a 10GB, a 40GB and 2 80GB drives for backup purposes. I’ve got a 20GB in my iPod. In my notebook I have a 60GB and a 160GB in the desktop. 160GB. 160,000,000KB or 160,000,000,000 bytes. Over 10 years my storage has jumped 8000 times. Does that seem odd to anyone? Here’s one better… Steve has basically put 880GB into a server, which makes for 0.88 terabytes. 44000 times where we were ten years ago.

Makes me feel like I’m looking at one of those pictures of the galaxy with a “You are here” arrow pointing at us…

Of course, all of this doesn’t change the fact that I’ll have to go to Fry’s for this thing – bah!