Wednesday, March 22, 2006
I Was Beginning to Think Cars Would Fly Routinely First…
Dean points to news of a 32 GB hard drive substitute.
If you had asked me as recently as ten years ago, and certainly closer to fifteen, I would have predicted - and did predict - the death of the hard drive in favor of solid state memory storage “cubes” or “sticks” of some kind. I always figured the industry would find a way to perfect and make “bubble memory” cheaply and in giant capacities, taking it beyond 2k capacity pocket computers and the memory in your calculator.
It never happened. At least, until recently when memory sticks became big for cameras, and for wrapping pretty plastic and some controls around and calling it an MP3 player. Still, small capacities, versus hard drives getting bigger and bigger, almost to the point of worry about quantum effects. How inefficient and dangerously… breakable, packaging up spinning platters, with heads skittering over them in vacuum, almost but not quite touching, marvels of miniaturization and perfect mechanical control.
But 32 GB on a stick? That’s a hard drive in size, albeit a small one now. Stick that in a case that’s an LCD, along with some ultra cool CPU(s) and electronics and you have a first pass at a real tablet computer of some utility and hardiness. That’s cool.