Memory

Posted May 9, 2008 at 10:16 am by admin in General.

When somewhere in the 1980s I got my first ‘home’ computer, it had a 64 KB (kilobyte) memory. This was twice the capacity of the previous model! But soon the games I played on that computer became increasingly bigger. After a few years a 64 KB memory was no longer sufficient and for hundreds of guilders I bought a 512 KB memory extension. I remember how smoothly and fast my already aged computer suddenly worked!

For storage I could only use 3.5 inch floppy disks for a maximum storage of 360 KB. Later I bought a 720 KB floppy disk drive for a whopping 1200 guilders.

At this time, the first hard disks appeared on the market. For a couple of hundred guilders you could buy a 20, 40 or 60 MB (megabyte, or 1024 KB) disk with a necessary controller. Completely unnecessary, was my opinion at the time. Just write more efficient code and you don’t need al that space. Boy, was I wrong!

When I started college in the 1990s, I bought my first Personal Computer. The internal memory already had an unimaginable capacity of 64MB and the hard disk was 4.3 GB (gigabyte or 1024MB)! A quick calculation: 4.3 GB equals about 14,090 of my first floppy disks. You could almost fill a room with them!

And when in the late 1990s video and audio were well integrated in the Personal Computer, lust for memory grew even more.

My current iMac has 3 GB of internal memory and 500 GB of hard disk storage capacity. Although this computer probably still has some years in it, I can’t help but notice the first 1 TB (terabyte, or 1024 GB) hard disks in the shops for a very reasonable price.

Most memory on an Personal Computer is used by running all those graphic applications. Just the GUI (Graphical User Interface) of the operating system in itself is already a big memory eating monster. This applies to Windows, Linux and Apple.

When Windows Vista came on the market it proved its operating system taxed your Personal Computer’s hardware even more. A lot more memory is required to make Vista run smoothly. Memory chip manufacturers worldwide anticipated on this by increasing memory chip production.

With disappointing sales of Vista, the market is now flooded with cheap large memory chips. And that leads to remarkable special offers.

Now I can buy an SD memory card for my digital camera of 1 GB for the mere sum of € 4.95. About 5 years ago this would have cost me € 100. Or how about one of these handy USB memory sticks? 8 GB for a tiny € 24.95!

So, for a price less than 5% of my floppy drive from the 1980s, I can now buy a device with up to 11,651 times more data storage.

This makes me really curious about the next 20 years! Will our Personal Computers have internal memories of several terabytes? Hard disks of multiple petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1024 TB)? Or will there be new techniques which allow us to easily store exabytes (1024 PB), zettabytes (1024 EB) or yottabytes (1024 ZB)?

Or maybe the question should be: will we have enough information to use all that storage?

Jim Nijkamp
Project Manager