Isn't it incredible?

I'd like to think I'm not that old yet. I'm 39. ...Wow, that's old. Really seems like I was 26 just a couple years ago, but I wasn't. Just feels like it. Oh, Christ, anyway...

Anyway! When I was 26, I bought my first AT computer, a 486 DX-66. That was October, 1994. I don't remember anymore precisely how big its hard drive was, but I think it was in the neighbourhood of 450 MB, or just over that. Seemed big then, but even at the time, I was bottoming it out in six months and having to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Today I carry around a USB memory pen with more storage, 512 MB, just for schlepping stuff around.

It was sometime in late 1998 when I bought my first 1GB drive. It cost something close to $300 and was pretty cutting edge at the time. Now I have a chip for my S80 that holds 4GB and cost me about $80 last summer.

I now have a computer with three internal drives. Between them, they hold around 800 GB. The main drive, C, I keep almost exclusively for the OS and the program files, though I have been storing downloads there. D is some kind of dinky utility drive carved out of C by the manufacturer; it's basically the computer's appendix as far as I'm concerned. F (320 GB) is where I've mostly been storing all my digital photos, and using it to temporarily house the files needed to back up DVDs. E (250 GB) was mostly the briefcase file to back up the photographs on F.

Well, I ran out of space on E to back up all my new photos and video captures. Can you believe that? Over 500 times the capacity of my first HDD, just dedicated to that. Obviously, that also meant I was nearly the limits of F. Incredibly, I needed more space. So, yesterday, I bought an external USB drive, 500 GB... yeah, over a thousand times the volume of my first drive; and it was only $140 or so. Took three hours last night, but I transferred all my photos to it. Takes up half the space on the drive, so there's still room to grow... for another year or so.

I deleted the originals off F, and instead created a briefcase there to back up M (the new external drive... the other letters are assigned to the two DVD drives and the built-in card readers. I think the days of A and B drives are behind us, though). So, I think that frees up E to be the catch-all. The ripped files, the downloads, the various things that collect in "My Documents" but don't really fit there... stuff like that.

It is amazing, though, isn't it?