Be Very Afraid

I am not afraid of many things. This, I suspect, is more the result of stupidity than bravery, but it is still the case.

I do have a morbid fear of heights.

Other than that, I can't think of anything. Until now.

When I saw this appear on my computer last night, I felt a shockwave of fear that has rattled me to my core.



Jebus!

Ironically, or just in case I don't know what "ironically" means, coincidentally, just one day before this message appeared, I purchased this bad boy.



The Maxtor one terabyte external hard drive. ONE TERABYTE. Remember back in the days when computers didn't even really HAVE hard drives, just those floppies that had 64kb or something? Here's the specs for you geeks.

Seriously. That's a lot of memory. Here's some interesting reading about terabytes. And, no, I did not put quotation marks around "interesting." Well, that time I did, but there's a good reason for it, I assure you.

According to that source, a terabyte (TB) is 1,024 gigabytes (GB). Or, in human terms, "Just [more than] a thousand megabytes equals one gigabyte, but just [more than] one million megabytes equals a terabyte!"

My head is having some difficulty fitting all this in, mostly because MY storage space is still based on the same technology as the abacus. Let's just say that "[More than] one trillion bytes, or exactly 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, make up a terabyte..."

Just amazing. It's wild sometimes thinking about the fact that all of our computer technology has come into existence within our lifetimes, and even if you're super young, it's still likely that the bulk of what we now take for granted in terms of processing speed and RAM and storage has come to be within your lifetime. We're the only generation that will have lived before the proliferation of desktop computing, during it, and after it has become so common that people can just walk into a Fry's and get a one terabyte external hard drive just in time to keep their computer from going the way of the floppy.

Yay, humans!