I think I will just convert file sizes to lengths of paper tape for comparison:

1K            102.4"
10K          85'
100K        853'
1M           1.6 Miles
10M         16.5 Miles
100M       165 Miles
1G            1,695 Miles
10G          16,947 Miles
100G        6.8 Earth Circumferences
1T             69.8 Earth Circumferences


On 5/31/2023 2:52 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 12:22:53PM -0500, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:
In 1981 when i got my first 5MB hard disk drive at work (I had to write the
drivers for the OS myself) I was able to put all or my source code,
binaries, executable, applications and the operating system and not fill
half of that disk.
A the first computer science class in school (very early 90s) our teacher
held up a 3.5" 1.44M floppy and told us that "this can hold all you'll
ever write" ... well, that aged worse than fresh milk ;-)

A single .raw file from my camera can be over 20MB now.
Indeed. The camera archive (2 people shooting DSLRs - strictly as a hobby,
not professionals) here is at 1.5T now here and of course only ever growing.

Even the compressed archive of my diploma thesis (written in LaTeX,
as one does - so no bloated MS Word files) won't fit on a 1.44M floppy
at 1.9M in size and that happened not that many years after the above
overly optimistic statement.

And anybody doing _any_ amount of programming outside of ones job
surely has written way more source code than would ever fit on a 1.44M
floppy, even after LZ4 compression. I know I did and I don't get to
write much code these days.

Is technology advancing us or just helping us to create more and more
storage needs 😁?
"Too much storage capacity" is a thing that fundamentally cannot exist,
data grows to fill available storage capacity eventually (and usually
much sooner than one likes). ;-)

Kind regards,
           Alex.

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