Or, "When I was a boy..." I hate to play the Methuselah of digital storage, but bad things happen when you stop being filled with wonder.

I have discussed, twice, the lack of competition in education and the advances free markets have wrought in other fields. I wanted to share my latest purchase with you (we have a few veterans of the storage industry with this blog). I just bought an LG 1GB, USB disk drive. It weighs less than the nail clippers in the photo. I bought it at Sam's Club for $60.

The first programs I wrote were stored to paper tape on a teletype. The teletype connected to a PDP-8 at Colorado School of Mines over an acoustic modem. I remember very little Fortran IV, but I remember the failures of paper tape. I found a spec for paper tape on the Internet. The ECMA spec from 1965 dictates that the holes shall be 2.540 mm apart, therefore a "gig" of paper tape will be 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * .00254 = 2727304.2 m (1630.9 miles). The spec also dictates that no roll of paper tape shall exceed 190mm in diameter, and that the recommended core is 50-52mm. And "The reel must be tightly wound in such a way as to ensure that a coil which has an outer diameter of 190 mm and an inner diameter of 52 mm shall contain at least 225 m of tape."

So each roll can contain 88682 bytes, and a gig of paper tape on spec will constitute 12,121 rolls. Throwing caution to the wind, and putting the entire gigabyte on a single roll with a 52mm core, the roll will be 18.6 meters wide. This progress marks less than thirty years, from my sophomore year of high school in 1976 to today. What would 30 years of competition and innovation in education have brought?