Nerd Convention

Trying to explain to our five-year-old daughter how much computers had changed, my husband pointed to our brand-new PC and told her that when he was in college, a computer with the same amount of power would have been the size of a house.

Wide eyed, our daughter asked, “How big was the mouse?”

 

I have had conversations like that with my own children. Hayden just can’t fathom it. I mean, my phone now has more power than I care to think about. My first purchased computer was 16MHz with a 100MB hard-drive. My phone has higher resolution, is 500MHz and has 16.5GB on flash memory. I work with servers that have 16 cores, 24+ Terrabytes of harddrive space. Unbelievable.

I showed my dad my phone, and mind you this was over a year ago. I flipped out the SD card, you know, the one about the size of a fingernail, and said, “That is 16GB.” He remembers his first computer that filled a room and it had 16k. My first embedded projects used micro-controllers with 4k of memory (and you can be surprised with what you can do with 4k.).

A colleague here at work whispered to me out of our small lab…”Take a look at this.” He was setting up a 2U 24TB disc array with 24 SAS drives with a 6 Gb/s output. My data warehouse has the same amount of disk space but a slower bit rate and 12 drives. This was quite impressive. Pretty soon, others in my group were looking at it, doing all the questions, “What is redundant?”, “What kind of power does this use?” Just then our manager walked by and said “What is this, a nerd convention?” Yeah, but it wasn’t too long before he was squatting down looking at it and asking the same questions.

Matt then cracked open a server. Now, I haven’t looked at the guts of the 1U servers in quite a while. I haven’t had the need. I’m the one that tries his darnedest to heat them up. It is very impressive what they look like. They are very engineered. No waste of space. The heat sinks are compact and the fans were positioned at the front, which surprised me. It had space for 12 memory dims. I just can’t get over how much things have changed over the years I have been in this industry. What is even more surprising, is that I still can bring a system to its knees. I still can saturate a network. I have more computing power than I ever contemplated, and it still isn’t enough.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Not much, but you aren’t paying for them either.