Even the biggest memory capacities, eventually, come to an end. Unless you’re investing in external 2tb hard drives, in which case they won’t. Not this year, anyway.
External 2tb hard drives (which are now cheap enough to make them worth considering) allow the home computer user access to memory banks that the Pentagon couldn’t have filled, 10 years ago. These days, the Pentagon probably have enough external 2tb hard drives to run the universe – back then, the idea of external 2tb hard drives would have been laughed out of court. Why would you need external 2tb hard drives, they’d have asked. To store a backup copy of the world? No-one needs the amount of memory you’d get with external 2tb hard drives. Not even the Pentagon.
You’ve got to bear in mind, of course, that in our hypothetical 10 year ago conversation, the word “terabyte” didn’t really exist, let alone actual external 2tb hard drives. The computer industry embodies a history of mechanical short-sightedness, repeatedly informing itself and everybody else that things like external 2tb hard drives will never be needed: Bill Gates, of all people, famously said in the 80s that he couldn’t see why anyone would ever need more than 250kb of memory, and Alan Turing himself was unable to believe that people would need computers in their homes at all. Bizarre, when you think that the computer industry’s historic development curve has been so far ahead of itself, technologically, that conspiracy theorists regularly claim it is based on information given to the U.S. government by little green men.
Despite the dichotomous short-sightedness of an industry supposedly built on the idea of progress, then, we have external 2tb hard drives; they’re cheaper than they ought to be; and they fit snugly into sexy little boxes that sit next to your existing memory components like books whose pages lead to other dimensions. External 2tb hard drives are, in memory terms, so appallingly vast that they might as well be gateways to other universes: when you think that that little grey box has the internal memory “space” to store everything ever written about 18 times over, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the alien conspiracy theorists were onto something after all. External 2tb hard drives, to contextualise, are one billion times more powerful than the 250kb supercomputers Bill Gates predicted we’d all be enjoying in our homes. That’s like saying that external 2tb hard drives are to the “original” future of computers what the population of Asia is to a family of four. Vistors from outer space, anyone?
