Bits and bytes

Back in the 1980s, I bought a Commodore 64; it was good in what it did, if the graphics were simple, to say the least, but when you got a good game conversion, like Zaxxon, it was like being on an arcade machine, in your house. But, in truth, such moments were rare, most games having blocky graphics, if that, and my interest waned and sold it shortly before it broke. Terminally. Shit happens, and I got to pocket £50 or so.

Fast forward to the 1990s and I got my first PC, a 386 with a CD drive and 320 meg of RAM. It seemed an immense amount. Windows 95 filled that up, however, and as the years went by I bought fast computers with more memory and more gadgets.

Now I have a two and a half year old laptop with three, now four, external hard drives. I take the occasional picture, and so the space for storing them and backing up images becomes ever harder. I have two camera, the newer one, if I shoot in RAW, produces files 16 or 17 Gig in size, and a few hundred of them a day really uses up storage space. I have two 320 Gig drives, plus a 500 which is connected to the laptop at all times, because I only have a couple of months shots on the laptop at any time, as this slows down it’s performance. The two drives which are disconnected are not now big enough for all the pictures I have, plus the digital music and files and other things we need to save, and so we took delivery of a 1.5 terabyte drive yesterday.
And during the night I transferred all the pictures onto it, it took over eight hours. But at least we have room for many more years, or months, of photographs before we think about splashing the cash again.

When I used to work on ships, I took a laptop and two external drives, one with every picture I had taken in case I wanted to edit or look at them; and another with films and TV series on to watch during weather down days and 200 CDs worth of music just in case I got bored!