The Large-Tiny Phenomenon

I can't be the only one experiencing the phenomenon that is little tiny jump-drives. External drives in general are one matter, interesting and worth discussing here, but right now I'm specifically thinking about those small jump drives that stick out of your USB slot for an extended period of time.

Size, of course, is what really boggles our mind. Twenty years ago, it would have been pure herecy to think that a thumb-sized stack of techno-plates glued to the inside of a plastic shell would hold 4 billion bytes of data. If you had told a scientist that you could carry 4 million kilobytes of data around your neck while you danced uphill in the snow, they'd have tied you to the stake (But scientist understand how ironic it would be to burn you, and would have instead left you there in your underwear for all the other scientists to snigger at).

In fact, the first USB drive (as we think about them now) only came out in 2000. It held about five-times more data than the popular Floppy Disks, and in the next decade soon forced the floppy disk into a category of technology nobody aspires for: the obsolete.

And the original Trek ThumbDrive was only about a third of the size of the floppy disk!

Since then, USB drives have gotten smaller and smaller and able to hold more and more. My brother owns a medium-sized external drive, about half the size of his laptop, with a terabyte of data space. A whole terabyte! That's like, a thousand gigabytes (which is, of course, a thousand megabytes, and so on)!! Of course, that counts as an external drive, not a jump drive, but about a year or so ago, I picked up a tiny jump drive at Staples that's about the size of my thumb-nail, and not even as thick as my pinky (this includes the protective metalic case, which is only a touch larger then the storage plates). The whole thing holds four gigabytes of data space, or 1000 songs.

I have to admit that, as a child born in a last years of the 20th century, I'm a bit used to the idea of technology increasing in leaps and bounds. However, even I can look back and see the progress of just the last decade, and compare it to any other decade in history, and recognize the exponential increase.

I do have a little problem with my amazingly large-tiny jump drives. I like to keep the bulk of my data stored there, in case our computer blows up or is magnetized or stomped on by Roman Centurians. Which means I somehow end up leaving my thumbnail-sized jump drive where I don't expect it, and can't see it, and spend all night worrying about the project due the next day that I'll have to completely redo. I guess with every technological advancment, there are pros and cons.