Yesterday I purchased a new 80G external hard drive to use for backing up my laptop and Kyle’s computer. As I am writing almost every day and taking more and more pictures I have too much data that is irreplaceable and will no longer fit on the 5G PCMCIA drive I was using.
I found two things very interesting with this hard drive: 1) the box was rather large and 2) the actual drive was rather small. Being a person that works in marketing the box is big because in our culture if the package was only as big as necessary there wouldn’t be enough room for branding and other marketing info and we as consumers would think that it wasn’t valuable enough. That’s right even in our “Green” culture we still need the big box to make us feel like we are getting value for our money.
As for how small the actual drive is it is not much bigger than a cassette tape. The first computer I worked on was the size of a small house and I would drive to the school administration building while in High School to be able to use it once a week. I would have to punch cards for each line of the code to run any program. Heaven forbid that you dropped the stack of cards because it could takes hours or even days to get them back in order and you definitely didn’t want to get one wet or bent. A simple program usually took hours to run and you would know that a card was out of order until you ran it. The first year in college my ‘computer’ was a slide rule and slide rule class was mandatory for anyone in engineering. My first calculator (required for my 2nd year in college) cost almost $200 and was really special because it had 5 functions; add, subtract, multiply, divide and do percentages. Yesterday while in staples they were selling an equivalent for under $2. This new 80G hard drive cost less than $2 per Gigabit.
Even though I am a technologist and work with leading edge and breakthrough technology every day, I still am amazed at the changes I have seen. Now I am starting to sound like my grandmother used to, oh wait, I am a grandmother.
I found two things very interesting with this hard drive: 1) the box was rather large and 2) the actual drive was rather small. Being a person that works in marketing the box is big because in our culture if the package was only as big as necessary there wouldn’t be enough room for branding and other marketing info and we as consumers would think that it wasn’t valuable enough. That’s right even in our “Green” culture we still need the big box to make us feel like we are getting value for our money.
As for how small the actual drive is it is not much bigger than a cassette tape. The first computer I worked on was the size of a small house and I would drive to the school administration building while in High School to be able to use it once a week. I would have to punch cards for each line of the code to run any program. Heaven forbid that you dropped the stack of cards because it could takes hours or even days to get them back in order and you definitely didn’t want to get one wet or bent. A simple program usually took hours to run and you would know that a card was out of order until you ran it. The first year in college my ‘computer’ was a slide rule and slide rule class was mandatory for anyone in engineering. My first calculator (required for my 2nd year in college) cost almost $200 and was really special because it had 5 functions; add, subtract, multiply, divide and do percentages. Yesterday while in staples they were selling an equivalent for under $2. This new 80G hard drive cost less than $2 per Gigabit.
Even though I am a technologist and work with leading edge and breakthrough technology every day, I still am amazed at the changes I have seen. Now I am starting to sound like my grandmother used to, oh wait, I am a grandmother.
Fowl Words
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