No, this is not a spam thread.
Newegg.com offers an external hard drive for $299. One terabyte. If you had told me not so many years ago such a thing would come to pass, I’d of thought you were a total nutcase.
Although I have no need for one, I find that I want to buy one just to be able to look at it and say, whoa, a terabyte.
The first IBM compatible computer I owned sported a 40 megabyte hard drive.
My cell phone’s got that much basic memory Dale - and my silly digital cameras got 8 gigs.
I’d give a lot for an old Atari 2600 and my treasured Pole Position game! 
I put a computer out on the curbside for garbage yesterday. The processor ran at a whopping 144 MHz, I couldn’t give it away.
When 1 TB drives reach $150 each I’m buying a pair for my RAID array.
Just cause.
I remember when I was SUCH hot stuff with my Comodore 128. It had, like, color graphics and actual music and stuff.
Do you ever try to imagine where we’ll be in another 15 or 20 years?
Scary. But I think the truly fine things in life don’t change all that much.
Tom (off to wrestle with my dog 
)
IIRC, our brain packs about 300 TB.
Work your Moore’s law, folks …
How long 'til our PC’s are smarter than we are?
well I might have 300 TB but the index is just shot 
http://stella.sourceforge.net/
and
http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareID=1215
Mukade
You youngn’s …the first computer I played with was a mainframe back at college. Hand wired magnetic “donuts”, this baby took up a whole wing of a building, had special air conditioning, multiple tape drives etc. It had a whopping 64 KILOBYTES of memory
Programs were entered on punched cards. Woe to you if you ever dropped your stack of cards!!
According to the SI standard and current usage, a terabyte (TB) contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10^12 bytes. Of course that is a bit confusing to computers that speak binary. Unfortunately even the numbers we use need to be converted to decode so the number 1,000,000,000,000 has an input of
001100010010110000110000001100000011000000101100
001100000011000000110000001011000011000000110000
0011000000101100001100000011000000110000
but a value of
1110100011010100101001010001000000000000.
Now that may see like a lot because you are use to seeing ones and zeros in base ten, but they are just symbols used to represent different numbers. To make it more intuitive we should use a symbol that gives an on/off or binary type mental image. ↑↓ works well in this regard so I will give one the “up” value and zero the down “value”. Converting the value of one terabyte to something easy for us to visualize would give you
↑↑↑↓↑↓↓↓↑↑↓↑↓↑↓↓↑↓↑↓↓↑↓↑↓↓↓↑↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓
which doesn’t seem as grand of a number as 1,000,000,000,000, and is not as terrifying as a terabyte, but it is a whole lot.
Ok I.D., thanks for clearing that up.
How do you measure the terabyte capacity of a human brain?
mount it on your desktop and press cmd-I.
It says “%^$#@(&fatal error///&^%$”
(then a pop-up ad for v*agra, screen freeze, and I had to reboot.)
If you listen to Ray](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines%22%3ERay) Kurzweil, about 50-100 years. Kurzweil’s a far smarter man than I, but I think he’s overly optimistic. I’m hoping for the Singularity to hit before I die, but I’m not planning on it.
In 1960 I spent the summer on the campus of Indiana University as a high school student interested in pursuing a career in science. I remember the Bendix computer that we had at the geological survey building inputted information with a roll of paper tape with punched holes. The punched tape seemed similar to the way that a player piano works, using rolls of paper with punched holes. IBM improved on this and developed the card with punched holes. That way you could correct an error in part of your program simply by removing the incorrect card and replacing it with a corrected one. Of course, you had to sit at the keypunch machine to punch your cards. We left our stack of punched cards in the bin for the computer operator to run the program overnight. I usually came back in the morning only to find that my program didn’t run. I found it to be a frustrating process.
I used to work for a company where my boss had written one of the very first Database applications in FORTRAN. The machine he wrote it for had two floppy disk drives. One held the application - 1 Kb. The other held the data: also 1 kb.
Over the years this application had grown a little, but it was my lot to debug this FORTRAN application. And I did it, too. I haven’t looked at a FORTRAN program for ten years now.
Oh, and we didn’t have to drop our own stacks of cards. If you didn’t take care to buy a round for the operators in the pub at lunchtime, they would drop your stack of cards for you.
When I worked in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh (in the lowly capacity as handyman) it was my misfortune to have to move the cupboard belonging to one of the senior academics. It was a six-foot high, two-foot deep, three foot wide cupboard entirely filled with punched cards. It was a lifetime’s work of astronomical calculations, and all on punched cards. It was impossible to move. The labourer’s proposal in such a case is to empty the cupboard. The academic was not prepared to let this happen. The cupboard did not get moved.
Later I learned that this was a ploy in the long-running campaign to get the same fellow to commit his punched-card programs to other media. They managed it in the end, but it was years after I left.
It is amazing.
Just a note, though: if you actually want a terabyte of storage, the more spindles you spread your data over, the better your performance will be.
So you are better to buy two 500 GB drives, better still to buy three 360 GB drives.
But yes, a terabyte on a single hard drive is impressive. It represents something that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible or at least prohibitively expensive.
–james
I did my dissertation research data with punched cards. I tried to explain what that was like to my daughters and they just, you know, looked at me.
Ummm, yeah. That would have been me! 
It’s amazing computers are so powerful and all that, and that we can be all productive and everything, but my eyes are tired staring at a screen all the time and sometimes I look out the window wistfully and imagine myself just raking leaves and pruning bushes and thinking how nice that would be. I’m getting weary of all this instant obsolescence of computer-related stuff.