This pic has been making the rounds in email recently, but I thought it was a great reminder of how far we have come:
More popular and funny pictures at Popular-Pics.com
What is it? A 5 MB Hard Drive from 1956. This pic shows the one ton drive for the IBM 305 RAMAC. I have mp3s now that won’t fit on that thing…..
Matt is currently an Instructional Designer II at Orbis Education and a Part-Time Instructor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Previously he worked as a Learning Innovation Researcher with the UT Arlington LINK Research Lab. His work focuses on learning theory, Heutagogy, and learner agency. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Learning Technologies from the University of North Texas, a Master of Education in Educational Technology from UT Brownsville, and a Bachelors of Science in Education from Baylor University. His research interests include instructional design, learning pathways, sociocultural theory, heutagogy, virtual reality, and open networked learning. He has a background in instructional design and teaching at both the secondary and university levels and has been an active blogger and conference presenter. He also enjoys networking and collaborative efforts involving faculty, students, administration, and anyone involved in the education process.
I’ve read that flash drives will eventually replace hard drives altogether. I love my little portable flash drive (no more floppy disks or CDs!), and the way the storage space is increasing, one day we’ll be able to take the entire contents of our computers with us on one little drive. That would be great… assuming I don’t leave it somewhere accidentally. Oops.
It would also be neat to be able to swap out the flash drive on an iPod, so you could change the playlists stored on the device without going through iTunes. You could put your music and movies on one drive and your audio books or course lectures on another, effectively giving you twice as much media available at any time, and the ability to switch content at will.
I’m not sure if the 80 gig iPods have storage space issues, but my little 6 gig Mini can’t hold all of my music and my Harry Potter audio books at the same time. Time to upgrade, I guess. :)
Can you imagine where we will be 50 years from now? With all of the advances in nanotechnology (shameless UT Dallas plug :)), the microcomputer may evolve into a microscopic computer. This could be bad for people like me who can’t find their keys half the time!
I really hope that Flash drives replace hard drives sooner rather than later. Hard drive crashes are still a huge issue, so having something that doesn’t crash would be awesome.