In the blink of an eye I watched my little girls grow from being newborns to full-fledged adults. It seems like yesterday I was coddling my daughters, walking them to their first day of school, and talking them through their first heartbreaks. This week my two daughters’ celebrate their 16’th and 19’th birthdays. Time flies.
My oldest was born in 1995, their mother and I didn’t have a ton of resources but prioritized a computer because we felt it would improve our lives. It was pretty snazzy: a speedy 66 megahertz processor, whopping 8megabytes of system memory, and a gigantic 40 megabyte hard drive. I scrimped and saved well over $1,000.00 so I could afford that big beige box and avoid traveling to campus.
I was stumped for birthday gift ideas this year so tonight I called both daughters to assist me with their presents. “Please Dad, no more digital cameras,” my youngest pleaded. My oldest had a choice between shoes and a new iPod. I figured I’d buy her shoes and give her my old iPod Classic.
Turns out she wants the iPod Classic because it has (in her words) “substantial storage.” Shortly after hanging up I pulled my old iPod and dusted it off. “This thing has enormous storage,” I thought to myself. Funny how time taints the best of memories; the 30GB iPod I remembered as being huge is now considered puny.
Now, for those of you who may not know my daughter, at 17 she asked me for a cassette Walkman which she currently uses daily. Whenever she mentioned an iPod Classic I figured I could pass off 30GB as big enough and save a few hundred bucks. The last thing she texted me after several lines of discourse was, “I’m not four, and I’m not falling for the penny is worth more than a quarter trick.”
I’m fairly relentless and don’t give up too easy if it means saving a few bucks so I decided to persuade her to take my old MP3 player. We bantered back and forth and finally I laid the “when I was your age” line on her. Of course I conveniently left out that computers were fairly nonexistent, but she stumped me. “Dad,” she said, “you were 24 in 1995.”
Flustered by losing the battle I pulled out my trusty Texas Instruments calculator and ran some numbers. My current 240GB solid state drive is more than 6,000 times larger than my original 40MB drive. Now the real kicker is the 40MB drive cost more in 1993 dollars than I paid for a top-of-the-line solid state drive in 2013.
A few things affect price and size. First and foremost is good old Economics. Demand for larger storage devices creates the need for more supply. Second is the country of origin. Of course all electronics are manufactured overseas. But the real kicker is the technology behind the drive mechanism. Mechanically, large drives are similar to smaller ones which means manufacturers need only change very little to have a huge capacity.
Ultimately I lost the battle of the iPod but won the memories of my daughters as I remembered the years on my technology timeline. Every landmark event in my kids’ lives is marked by data storage size. At 40MB by oldest was born, 80MB she learned to walk, 120MB my youngest was born, and at 240GB and a technology later I’m out nearly $300.00 for a brand new 240GB iPod Classic.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)