Storage Nostalgic

Nostalgic is something of taking pleasure in experiencing the glories of olden days.

When I rewind my life clock by 25 years, I'm thrilled to recap the storage experience. During my Under-graduation @ late 80s, our lab had one powerful (note the point) PC (Personal Computer) from IBM; of course high cost too. The name of the system is IBM PC XT 286.

That powerful PC configuration was "Waugh" factor, then:

Processeor : 80286 @ 6 Mhz
Main Memory : 640 Kb Ram.
Graphic Adapter : CGA.
Hard disk : 20 Mb.
Floppy disks : 5"¼ 1.2 Mb & 3"½ 720 Kb.
Operating System : IBM PC DOS 3.3.
Bios dated : 21/04/1986.

The above picture is so called near super computer during my college days with 20 MB hard disk storage. Today, on watching the news of SanDisk's 1 TB SD card (nearly million times better), I'm amazed !!!

SanDisk has unveiled the biggest SD card in the world — a prototype card with an outrageous 1 terabyte of memory. Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/sandisks-1tb-sd-card-has-more-storage-than-my-computer/

Interesting to note that it was only 16 years ago that the company introduced its first 64 megabyte SD card, while two years ago they debuted the 512GB card, which was then the world's biggest. Things have moved fast, though, and compared to the 64MB card, today's 1TB version offers 16,384 times more storage.

This SDXC card is only a prototype at this point, with no details available on price or release date, but it's still an impressive milestone. The company says the 1TB card is necessary to match the increasing demand for memory-heavy formats, including 4K and 8K footage, 360-degree video and mixed reality (MR).

However, there will be some downsides. The 1TB card is certain to be prohibitively expensive, and at such a large capacity, read and write speeds are going to be comparatively slow. Now imagine the anguish if your 1TB card corrupts and you lose everything on it.

Itz no wonder, the world can see SD card of PetaByte or ZettaByte in a d(r)ecent time-frame. Isn't it a drastic IT growth in last few years?

Fire Price Slash

Couple of weeks back, I wrote about Amazon Alexa and its functionality.  Amazon is taking this emerging technology with dog-food mode i.e. to leverage in its own tablet product - Fire.

Amazon wants to be under the Christmas tree this year. It's cut the price of its new Fire tablet almost in half and added its popular voice assistant, Alexa, in hopes of making it a hot holiday item, despite a slump in overall tablet sales.

The new Fire HD8 tablet will cost $90, down from $150. Mixed-use battery life is up to 12 hours from 8, and the base storage is doubled to 16 gigabytes.

The biggest change is that the tablet will have Alexa functionality. That means that when users tap and hold the tablet's home button, they can ask the assistant for anything from weather reports to news queries, and also get the device do things like adjusting the lights or temperature on compatible smart-home devices.

Are you ready for XMas Fire purchase ?!!?