Computing 20 years ago....and 10 years ago....

[poltr1]

Twenty years ago, I was still in college, pursuing a degree in computer science. I was only starting to get into PCs, WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3. My machines of choice were the VAX systems -- some ran VAX/VMS (later called OpenVMS), and Unix.

I think the VAX 8600 was starting to be rolled out then. The main disk storage at the time were RA81s.
According to the The Digital Equipment Corporation timeline, an RA81 could hold 456 Mb of data, and an RA82 could hold 622 Mb of data. That's small by today's standards.

Ten years ago, I had just started at Ball Aerospace & Technologies. By then, the VAX was in my history, and was working on a Silicon Graphics O2 box, some Unix boxes, and a few Intel boxes running Linux.

The 02 had an Iomega Jaz drive attached to it. The Jaz cartridge could hold 1 Gb of data. Again, for the time, and for removeable media, that was large.


Now, we can cram 1 Gb of data onto an SD card. We're walking around with multi-gigabit iPods, Palm PDAs, and iPaqs. We're connecting via wireless high-speeed internet, DSL, and cable-based broadband. Hard drives are pushing half a terabyte -- 500 Gb.

Do I dare predict what the next 10 or 20 years will hold for us?