160 Gigabytes

[Ben]

I rewatched "Johnny Mnemonic" today. The last time I watched it was probably ten years ago. It struck me as very funny today that Johnny, with a memory doubler, held a whole 160gb in his head.

I suppose that for 1995, that seemed pretty futuristic, but it's one of those cases where reality ended up surpassing science fiction by far. I think the movie takes place circa 2025. William Gibson was the writer, so it's not like some sci-fi hack came up with the number. He also wrote in some yet to be invented wetware tech for physical enhancements, so the memory is the one place he was really behind the curve, or alternately, the real world went bleeding edge rather quickly.

It probably really did seem futuristic back then. I think IDE drives of the time topped out at half a gig, if I remember right. I think it was also still the era where people (me included) thought, "What the heck would you do with a gigabyte of space!?!" Now I have no problem envisioning my need for a petabyte drive in five or so years. 

Also funny, when they did the data dump to the web, they told everyone, "Turn on your VCRs and record this."

[HeroHog]

[AJ Dual]

Stuff like that was why William Gibson gave up on writing Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk set in the future. He couldn't keep up.

His latest few "Cyberpunk" novels could pretty much be set in present day, maybe with a few more political or social trends stretched out into a bit of hyperbole to make them more interesting.

[Hawkmoon]

Remember, the original IBM PC came with a single floppy drive that had a capacity of 360 KB, and IIRC either 64 or 128 KB of RAM. File names were limited to 8 characters and a 3-character extension because anything else used too much memory.

MS-DOS couldn't handle more than 640 KB of RAM, because at the time nobody envisioned that there would ever be a need for more than that.

My first computer was an AT clone that had 1 MB of RAM and a HUUUUUGE 20 MB hard drive. When I bought it, I was sure that would last me for a lifetime ...

[zahc]

Those kind of misses are universal. My favorite is the asimov short story where military planners need people who can do arithmetic, because you can fit people in very small ships that are too small to fit a computer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

In Neuromancer, Case's capsule hotel is broken into and "megabytes" of "high-grade RAM" stolen, which is a double-miss...both the memory capacity, and the concept that computer hardware would be expensive and worth stealing.

Multitudes of stories have very good microfilm and very small audiotapes.

Verner Vinge did very well, but he was writing from the 80s/90s.

[T.O.M.]

First PC I bought had an 8 gig hard drive, which I was assurred would last me a lifetime.   It was in 1998.  My current desktop has 180 gigs of internal hard drive and an external terrabyte of storage (lots of music and photos).  The terabyte drive is physically the size of a hard cover book.

[makattak]

http://www.futuristgerd.com/2012/12/27/what-may-happen-in-the-next-hundred-years-john-elfreth-watkins-predictions-from-100-years-ago/

http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf

People make a big deal about Mr. J. Elfreth Watkins, Jr., predicting cell phones, television, and (arguably), the internet.

But look at how much he got wrong. MOST prognostications work that way- there will be a few hits for many, many misses.  

[Brad Johnson]

Stuff like that was why William Gibson gave up on writing Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk set in the future. He couldn't keep up.

"We're gonna hack the Gibson!"

Brad

[lee n. field]

Remember, the original IBM PC came with a single floppy drive that had a capacity of 360 KB, and IIRC either 64 or 128 KB of RAM. File names were limited to 8 characters and a 3-character extension because anything else used too much memory.

Less than that, on the very original, I think.


I've got this on my shelf at home.  A hideously dull piece of work I picked up at the time.  "Fifty years in the future!" as envisioned by the Foreign Policy Association.  I'm keeping it around to see how off it is.

[MechAg94]

First PC I bought had an 8 gig hard drive, which I was assurred would last me a lifetime.   It was in 1998.  My current desktop has 180 gigs of internal hard drive and an external terrabyte of storage (lots of music and photos).  The terabyte drive is physically the size of a hard cover book.

Mine was a Gateway 2000 with an 800 MB hard drive if I remember correctly.  I mainly remember I had to set up special boot up sequences that would free up RAM so I could run Xwing and a couple other games. 

[Kingcreek]

I computerized the office in 1985. The "computer" with 5 workstations, software, and a tractor feed printer was over $22k. That was Pre-windows MS-DOS, monochrome screens, and tape backups. What is very basic now was superfantastic 30 years ago.

[mtnbkr]

Mine was a Gateway 2000 with an 800 MB hard drive if I remember correctly.  I mainly remember I had to set up special boot up sequences that would free up RAM so I could run Xwing and a couple other games. 

A friend of mine had a similar PC (Gateway 2000) and had to do the exact same thing with Xwing. :)

Chris

[41magsnub]

The first that was mine was a Gateway 2000 386sx (no math coprocessor for this guy) with a 10MB hard drive.  I got really good at autoexec.bat and config.sys trying to get enough free conventional memory to run Falcon 3.0.  I was greedy, I wanted sound, a mouse, and a joystick to work at the same time!   I was super pissed at its replacement, a Packard Bell (lol) that even though it was a Pentium 90 and better, could not get past like 580K free conventional RAM.  I spent many hours trying to get past that.

[dogmush]

You guys are adorable with your PC's.

LOAD "*",8,1

[Ben]

Stuff like that was why William Gibson gave up on writing Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk set in the future. He couldn't keep up.

His latest few "Cyberpunk" novels could pretty much be set in present day, maybe with a few more political or social trends stretched out into a bit of hyperbole to make them more interesting.

Though as I think about it more, Gibson may not have been off by more than a decade or so. The "doubler" was software, so I assume Gibson meant it to be compression. For the physical 80 gigs, they had to remove a small portion of Johnny's brain to get it to fit. So it's not just memory size we need to consider, but physical size.

Probably the most compact memory we have now is a 512gig micro SD. Maybe there's something that small with more memory, but I can't think of anything. Otherwise the next smallest form factor would be be one of the smaller flash drives, which can hold up to a gig.

So when you work in form factor as well as capacity, he's probably not as far off as I originally thought when I was thinking of >tb capacities, which are still a fairly big form factor (at least for sticking in someone's head).

[RoadKingLarry]

I guess the Sci-Fi authors never heard of Moore's Law.
A little extrapolation based on that and they could have been fairly well up to date even today.

It has been an interesting path though. Just a little over 30 years ago I was rocking a Commodore 64, connected to a 19" TV with a cassette tape for storage.
Now I'm sitting next to a processor running 3.2 GHz with 4 terra bytes of hard drive viewed on a 24" lcd monitor and adjusted for inflation I'm thinking I paid less for this setup than I did for the C64.

I've got several 32G SD cards and a couple of 32G thumb drives that were a good bit less than $1 a Gigabyte.

[KD5NRH]

I forget what KITT's original stated capacity was, but I do remember thinking (when re-watching the original series last year) that it was awfully small to even have a speech synthesis program, much less an AI.

Then again, he didn't have Windows clogging things up, or any of the other bloatware that now needs hundreds of MB to do what it did in a few KB a decade or two ago.

[Fly320s]

The terabyte drive is physically the size of a hard cover book.

Get rid of that giant drive.  Come join us in 2016.

This one is 2TB in 4.3 x 3.2 inches.

[dogmush]

Last years WD Ultra.  3TB, 4.3x3.2x0.9 inches, $129

Shakes head.  digital storage size is getting kind silly.

[KD5NRH]

Last years WD Ultra.  3TB, 4.3x3.2x0.9 inches, $129

I have a pair of 2TB Seagates sitting here from our dead NAS that I keep meaning to order SATA cables for so I can stuff them in my desktop.  Haven't filled up the one it came with yet, but I'm sure I'd find uses for the extra space.

[brimic]

I also don't think that writers 20 years ago would have ever guessed that nearly every human being in every developed country would be carrying a small handheld device that put most of the collective knowledge of mankind at their fingertips. Other than maybe Huxley, I don't think anyone ever saw the use of these powerful devices being wasted on porn, cat videos, hookups, naricism, and dick pics.

[Ben]

I also don't think that writers 20 years ago would have ever guessed that nearly every human being in every developed country would be carrying a small handheld device that put most of the collective knowledge of mankind at their fingertips. Other than maybe Huxley, I don't think anyone ever saw the use of these powerful devices being wasted on porn, cat videos, hookups, naricism, and dick pics.

Well, they probably knew about the porn. I think Usenet was already 50% porn pics by the mid 90's. 

[Kingcreek]

1976 organic chemistry class at Bradley University. We had to take our tray of key punch cards (various properties of an unknown compound) to the computer center and the whole second floor housed the IBM computer with its rows and rows of tape drives. Handed them across the counter to a geeky grad student and 2 days later we could pick up our green bar printout to turn in for a grade.
cutting edge of technology back then.

[KD5NRH]

We had to take our tray of key punch cards

Oh, the joys of watching the expression on someone's face when you do a deck swap to blank or junk cards, then appear to riffle shuffle their project.

[brimic]

1976 organic chemistry class at Bradley University. We had to take our tray of key punch cards (various properties of an unknown compound) to the computer center and the whole second floor housed the IBM computer with its rows and rows of tape drives. Handed them across the counter to a geeky grad student and 2 days later we could pick up our green bar printout to turn in for a grade.
cutting edge of technology back then.

 
I tell kids these days that I had to cut my printed peaks from my HPLCs out with scissors and weigh them on an analytical balance in order to integrate area %s- and that was only about 25 years ago.