this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...
Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a 'what the fuck...' moment
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you'd need "terabytes of storage, and that's probably not possible". And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
Poor Keanu Reaves gave up his childhood memories in Johnny Mnemonic to store something like 100GB of data in his brain. I don't remember the Star Trek storage callout cause they were generally pretty good about just fabricating their own units for stuff (future sci-fi writers should take note, it's always easier to make up units then deal with pedantic people on the internet).
indeed, most of their references to quantities of information use quads; there are a few using bytes though.