Gigglebit: storage, then and now

10 Oct 2014

Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note.

Like any sector, technology has a serious side, and it is often issues within this serious side that make headlines or that organisations need to explore for their business. Malware! Data breaches! Cloud storage! Do I really need this software? Which candidate has the best IT skills for this job? And what the heck is fog computing?

With Gigglebit, we turn the spotlight on humorous and/or amazing content about science and tech, because sometimes the lighter side should be taken seriously, too.

Today we look at the evolution of storage. Now most people tend to doze off when you discuss storage and talk about megabytes, gigabytes, petabytes and zetabytes, but if it affects them directly in terms of the phone in their hands or their photo collection, they are all ears.

To show you just how far we’ve come, below is a picture of IBM engineers loading a 5MB drive onto an airplane in the 1950s. Below that is a picture of a 2GB microSD card common in most of today’s Android smartphones. Many of these microSD cards are sold today in sizes from 4GB to 64GB. In February 2014, SanDisk has announced the Ultra microSDXC memory card that is sold in sizes between 8GB to 128GB.

Then:

Now:

Micro SD card image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com