Ah, modern times

It occurs to me that, sometime soon, I need to stock up on 16GByte MicroSD cards.

Then it occurs to me to think how that would sound to someone from the distant past.  Like, a decade ago.  Stock up on fingernail-sized 16GByte memory devices?  Is this a government contract?  Where do you even get such things, and at what cost?

Think back a decade before that, and it's more like fingernail-sized 16GByte memory devices?  What wizardry is this?

In another acknowledgment of changing times, I just got around to putting a new check register in my checkbook and writing 2018 across the top.  (Yeah, it's the 5^th already, but the first checks of the year don't get written until next week.)

Hmmm, teeny flash cards.  Five for $37, same as the last batch?  Or ten for $59?  Eh... the former, I guess; they're Class 10, while the other deal is Class 4, and performance counts a little in the immediate application.  Same ones I bought in February, and they seem to work OK.  Same-day delivery at no extra charge?  Bonus!

Comments

[Joel]

Weird, huh? I still sometimes chuckle over two multiple-terabyte external harddrives on my desk, each the size of a pack of playing cards, that I own because somebody else *gave them away.*

[Eric Wilner]

Yeah. Every so often I'm reminded of a machine-vision project that didn't happen back in the late 1980s. We could just about achieve the required resolution, frame rate, and event detection with available (albeit very expensive) technology... but storing the video from multiple cameras for many seconds before the event was detected was going to span several washing machines, and there was just no way to shoehorn those into the space available (besides which, it was a vibration-rich environment, and thus not exactly friendly to old-timey disk drives).
Now, the computer and bulk storage would all fit on a credit-card-sized board, and be plenty vibration-resistant. Couldn't use a single MicroSD card for the storage, though; the combined bandwidth from the multiple cameras would be too high, so some cleverness in storage architecture would be required.