Memory

abrahamKim

triggered a trip down memory lane for me today. He asked me if I still had a copy of my senior thesis where I referenced using fractal dimension to assess right and left hemisphere brain function. I'm sure a hard copy exists somewhere, but the electronic version is probably saved on an Iomega zip drive. How far we've come with computer memory.

The Apple II had an external 5.25" "floppy" disk that stored just under 1MB as I recall. The Macintosh had the 3.5" disks that were also called "floppy" even though they were much less so. They stored 1.4MB. I had an external hard drive for my Macintosh Plus that was 40MB. The maximum RAM was 4MB. 

Freshman year of college, I upgraded to a PowerMac 7200/75 with a 500MB hard drive. I kept this computer until I got the original iMac in 1998. The Bondi blue iMac had a 4GB hard drive and no floppy drive. This is the computer I used to write my thesis. I used the aforementioned Iomega zip drive to back up my files. This external USB drive used 100MB disks. This drive was famous for the dreaded "click of death," which was a critical failure in which the drive refused to read disks and could potentially corrupt the data stored on disks. Thankfully, I never experienced it. 

I still have the original iMac and the zip drive somewhere. I should boot them up and see what goodies are saved on them.