Holy Schmoley

Obviously, there's an on-going pandemic, so I try to stick close to home.  

I have a yardstick event which I'm clinging to which will, for me, mark the end of the pandemic in my mind.  Near us is an Ikea store.  It's across the street from the Mall of America.  In my head, the day the pandemic is officially over for me, I intend to go walk around the Mall of America and just see what's there, then toddle across the street to Ikea, and wander the store, hit the top-floor dining room, and pick up a few ... well, minor items, really.  They have a marketplace area which has some good deals on basic household needs - wooden spoons and the like - and other items.  

I really enjoy the food in the Ikea dining room, and I also enjoy the view and ... well, for me, it will be a "normal day".  

But aside from that, there are times I do need to go shopping.  That is, in the rather male version of the activity, I had a list of items which I needed to purchase.  In specifics, I am running low on the sort of pens I typically use in my day-to-day work.  That is, I'm a bit of a writing snob.  I suppose the fact that I try to use correct English as what I was taught to do, that's part of it.  I'm not referring to the school-based education I was afforded, but rather, the correct sentence structure I learned from reading one hell of a lot of books.

Yeah, I read.  If there's a thing I'm addicted to, that's probably number two.  Number one is most likely to be food, but reading is a pretty close second.  I don't consider breathing an addictive thing, because, frankly, my body was doing it a very long time before I became aware of it.  And much like breathing, I do find that the analysis of the various components of language to describe what a correctly composed sentence should look like is about as useful as thinking of breathing while attempting to continue that activity.  I have a problem ending sentences with prepositions.  I do not avoid this because it's a rule, but rather because it feels sloppy and clumsy.  Or as my father would sometimes quote, ending a sentence with a preposition is "something with which I will not put."  Yeah, he ain't gonna put up with that shit, but that wasn't my father's style.

Neither did he resort to vulgarity or profanity often, if at all.  I'm sure he knew a fair number of dirty jokes and stories, but he was an old-school gentleman, and they did not repeat such in the presence of children or the fairer sex.  And while I'm not female, from the day I was born until the day I die, I will remain his child.  And I get that.  

I do tend to agree with him that profanity is the sign of an underdeveloped vocabulary.  However, I also ascribe to the sentiment which was I believe originally expressed by Samuel Clemens in his Mark Twain persona, where he said "on occasion, profanity provides relief denied even unto prayer."  Yup.  Whack your thumb with a hammer, prayer hasn't the same level of pain relief as a good solid string of profanity.

Just saying, as the kids say these days.

To come to the point of this little diversion, while shopping this afternoon, I stumbled across a few rather shocking moments.  It started the other day with a brief review of the Amazon selection of MicroSD cards.  If you've been born in the later decades of the 20th Century or later, you are most likely aware of these little miracles.  I've been watching them since their inception, and I'm ... well, about twelve leagues beyond awed and amazed.  Stunned does not begin to capture it.

I suppose it would probably help if I briefly (as I can, we hope) recap some of my experience with technology.  My first computer was a VIC-20, a Commodore computer, with a floppy disk drive.  Yes.  That old.  It had the original 5 K, but my father did spring for the expansion cartridge that boosted us up to around 12K most of the time.  After that, my second computer was my father's IBM PC - the original one, with dual 360K floppy drives.  You that have been around a while may recall that was termed the "Full Height Drive" for some years.

The first BIG computer I dealt with was a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX-11/785 computer.  This was, back in the day, referred to as a mini computer.  The one I grew to love was used by my college, and supported up to sixty-some students at a time.  The performance of the machine suffered under that many users, but the system was available to anyone on campus who had access to a hard-wired terminal, or one of 24 students who could dial in using 2400 baud modems.  

Yes, children, 2400 baud.  In comparison to the connection I have today to the internet, which is a Gigabit cable modem connection - or roughly 447,392 times faster.  

Yeah, I know. Boggles the mind. 

A bit like this past week did.  

I found a listing on Amazon for a one terabyte MicroSD card for $124.99.  I mention this because, not all that long ago, Mr. Robert Thompson, the late author of a whole series of build-your-own PC books NOT directed at the For Dummies crowd, mentioned that the "sweet spot" for hard drives was when the price fell below $100 per megabyte.  That is, if one was attempting to build a computer with one terabyte of storage using the original 5 megabyte hard drives that came to market back around the time of Baby Jesus, you'd need over 200,000 drives to store that much.  And while I'm no expert on electrical theory, I am certain that it would have required more than a few PC Power Supplies to run up enough electrical power to keep that many drives spinning.

What shocked me was that one was able to find a terabyte of storage in a chip form for that low price.  Then we found a 2 terabyte hard drive - the spinning sort, not the solid-state-drive sort - that was on the shelf at Target for $49.99.  Yes, that's right.  We're under $25 a terabyte.  Or under 2.5¢ per GIGABYTE. Which is significantly less than $100 a megabyte.  I mean, $100 a megabyte dropped the price of a kilobyte down to around 9.7¢ each.  We're a rather significant order of magnitude below that.  

So yes, I do have a crap-ton of external drives hanging off this computer.  At the moment, I have eight boxes of platters outside the computer whirling along.  I keep things separated in storage, archival storage for things like photos and music, backups, where I maintain multiple copies of everything on this computer, and backups of the backups, where I maintain copies of copies of data.  

Yes, I am afraid of losing data, and I haven't for years because of this method.  What intrigues me about the future is the tablet I got about four years ago, which supports a MicroSD slot.  It's currently got a 32 gig MicroSD card.  I've pared down and stored a portion of our music library, which right now sits at just under 30 gigs, on that card. I wanted spare room for other things, so it's not all the music - just the stuff I like.  

But holy schmoley, Batman.  I expect that yet within my lifetime, I may live to see some small-format media device that may store a zettabyte or so.  Huh?  Well, let's go back to school.

A byte is still an 8-bit thing.  That is, every character you see on a computer screen is represented by a string of eight zeros and ones.  That string gives a net total of 255 possible combinations - everything from 00000000 to 11111111.  

So a kilobyte - or 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 1024 - that is, 2 x 2 = 4, that result, multiplied by 2, brings us to 8, then again, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and 512, before the final doubling to 1024.  And if you take 1024 kilobytes combined together, they make a megabyte.  Back in the early days of computers, we carried around 360K floppy disks.  These days, a program like Word doesn't get out of bed for less than about 10K.  What's in an empty file, you ask?  Well, there are all sorts of definitions, such as the margins, the orientation of the page, the default language, and all sorts of other bits of information - literally - that are needed for a "blank" page.  And we'd have entire programs that fit on those 360K floppies - things like spreadsheets, word processors - heck, even games.  And then we went to the high-density floppy disk, then the 3.5" disks came out, and increased from 1.2 meg to 1.44 meg of storage on each disk.  And then things started to get insane.  I mean, if you had the money, you could plonk down $500 bucks and get a 5 megabyte hard drive that would let you store your entire operating system AND all of the applications you need, AND all of the work you did!  That was huge!  

Then things got truly insane.  At my first real professional technical job, we had managed, somehow, to hire a technological dinosaur to, for a time, manage our network.  His advantage was he had some experience, at the time, which few did.  His primary claim to fame in our office appeared a little less than a week after he started.  We learned not to call him unless we wanted to lose work.  Back then, computers often chose to ignore the users and do their own thing.  This was, most often, due to bugs in the software, though it could also be evoked by simple user error.  And his primary method of troubleshooting was to walk up to the computer and press the reset button built in to every computer's faceplate back then.

So if you were hoping to save a document you'd spent hours editing, you learned not to call him.  And I found myself giggling quietly one day when he growled at me that no sane individual would dare consider purchasing one of the then-new Gigabyte hard drives, because, you know, no sane person would want to lose that much data at once.

Well, yeah, but he was talking about the relative density of data.  Back then, we would think of a gigabyte of data to be years of work.  These days, a couple of gigabytes are eaten up by three or four high-resolution photos.  Or an album.  But what the heck.  After the Terabyte, we have the Petabyte.  Then the Exabyte, and then the Zettabyte.  Beyond that is, at least in my frame of reference, the mythical yottabyte.  I believe beyond that we're looking at the brontobyte, or 1024 yottabytes.  And I believe the Geopbyte is 1024 Brontobytes.  

Which, by the time my grand kids have grand kids, will be about the amount of space Microsoft Windows 57.2 will need.  I expect it will be organized into a media form that looks roughly like a needle, to permit minimal contact to increase the density of the devices and permit several million of them to be combined into a humongobyte array, that is, the combination of 1024 Geopbytes would make a maxibyte, 1024 maxibytes would make a glopabyte, 1024 glopabytes would make a wallopbyte, 1024 wallopbytes make a trulyhugebyte, and 1024 trulyhugebytes make a maximegabyte, and 1024 maximegabytes will make an areyouseriousbyte, and 1024 areyouseriousbytes will make a humongobyte.  Or, because a kilobyte is 10^3, a megabyte is 10^6, and a gigabyte is 10^9, terabyte is 10^12.  Petabytes are 10^15, exabytes are 10^18, and Zettabytes are 10^21.  Yottabytes are 10^24, brontobytes are 10^27, which would make the geopbyte 10^30.  My truly humorous attempt (that is, I'm trying, probably not succeeding) at describing beyond that would put the maxibyte at 10^33, the glopabyte would be 10^36, the wallopbyte would be 10^39, the trulyhugebyte would be 10^42 (though I'd be OK with that being the Dadamsbyte - you figure it out), and the humongobyte clocks in at 10^45.  That is, a 1 followed by 45 additional digits before the decimal point.   

How big is that number?  Well, let's have some fun.  Let's say that humanity first was able to call itself "human" 150,000 years ago.  That's, from right now, 4,730,400,000,000 seconds ago.  And our sun's estimated age is 5,000,000,000 years, or 157,680,000,000,000,000 seconds.  And I'm proposing that we may at some point be able to store 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Except it would be the equivalent of 2 x 2 for a very, very long time.