for the rest of my life. I have a 4.0 Ph.D. GPA.

I spent $180 on a used 4.0MB (that’s MB as in ‘megabyte,’ not GB as in ‘gigabyte’) hard drive. It was about the size of a watermelon, heavy as sin, and unreliable as hell (it developed a dozen or so new bad sectors every week, literally bleeding data into the void).

It was, at the time, amazing technology. It could almost hold the complete works of Shakespeare in electronic form, and it could transfer a full 4.0MB of data in just over 24 hours. It cost about $180 a year to run at 24 hour/day operation.

Sometime next week I will take delivery of 4.0TB of storage (that’s TB as in ‘terabyte’, not GB as in ‘gigabyte’) that costs the same $180 new, costs only $20 a year to run, and is the size and weight of a large paperback novel.

It will hold more than 2 million copies of the complete works of shakespeare, and will be so reliable that I don’t ever anticipate losing any data stored on it. It will transfer 4.0MB of data many dozens of times in the space of a single second.

The late ’80s 4.0MB hard drive sounded like an airplane, almost required earplugs of those in the same room, got so hot you couldn’t touch it, and was an ugly, unfinished, industrial steel gray. The new storage will be so silent I will have to place my head against it to hear whether it’s on or not, so cool I won’t be able to tell based on the touch of my cheek, and will be a decor-friendly chrome color.