growth hormone

Moore's law says that everything about computers is just gonna keep on getting faster, bigger, more. Actually, Moore's law isn't a law at all, just something someone at intel noticed about 40 years ago, that about every 18 months computing power (whatever that means) will double. That's why intel has been so focussed on clock speeds on its chips, since that's an awfully easy way to self fulfill their own prophecy. But putting that aside, there is one way to tell that computer power keeps growing faster than our uses for these expansions in power.

When we bought our first G3 tower, back in 1999, it came with a 6 gig hard drive and 256 megs of ram. Also a 14 inch CRT. Plenty of space in every way. When I wanted to do some video editing with it I added and external firewire drive. I was going to add 30 gigs, but there was a screw up and I got a 45 gigger from LaCie to make it up to me.

When we bought the G4 iMac, it came with a 60 gig hard drive (10 times the space,) 768 megs of ram and a 15" LCD. I ended up adding an external 160 gig drive about 18 months ago, for backup and video, etc.

We just ordered our G5 iMac. It has a 400 gig internal drive (only about an 7 times jump this time,) 2 gigs of ram and a 20" LCD. I expect that in about 18 months we'll be adding an external drive with a terabyte of storage, if the pattern holds.

At this rate, my next computer will have two terabytes of internal storage, 6 gigs of ram and a 30" screen. What in hell will I do with it all?