Size matters

Sunday night I went out to dinner with a dozen friends and some of their families, all of us veterans of the Honolulu Club. We were all there at the startup back in 1980, and we all remember the work we put in trying to get it up and running (it mostly is, although the ownership has changed at least twice since we left later in that decade).

Anyway, I had an unusual thing happen as I was trying to take a picture of the group. I got the following alarm on my camera’s display screen: “memory card full.” I’ve never had that happen before. As I was replacing my 128MB card with the 1GB card I had in the camera bag, I occurred to me that that $9 – $20 card has 78 times the capacity of the 13.2MB hard drive we had on the IBM S/34 computer when we opened the Club, and the same amount more of the drive we bought for $5,000.00 to double our hard disk space about three years after we opened. Those 13.2MB drives were each the size of a medium pizza, by the way.

Ain’t miniaturization grand?

2 Comments

  1. A few weeks ago I replaced the 1 Gig flash card in my camera because after almost 5 years it was getting flakey. I bought a 16 Gig card that cost about 1/3 what the 1 Gig cost. Now my camera reports it has room for 2400 RAW images.

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