Financial & Travel Musings

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One of the really big changes in computers over the years has been the amount of memory that’s available and the technology that it uses.

The very first computer used clockwork (really: it was built in 1850) but in modern times things began with vacuum tubes before moving on to magnetic drums, then tapes and finally the magnetic discs that we still use today. Actual internal memory went through a similar cycle moving from clockwork to vacuum tubes to magnetic drums then magnetic cores and then on to solid-state or integrated circuits as we’d call them today.

That continual change and improvement in the technology meant that the need to limit memory has all but disappeared. As recently as 1976 for instance it was commonplace to have 11 users sharing all of 48k of memory yet within a few years a single personal computer had a great deal more memory and these days even 2GB of memory rarely seems enough yet that’s 87,000 times the amount that eleven users shared just over 30 years earlier.

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When you’re looking after a number of computers it doesn’t take long for the room to fill up with the things which is a nuisance as you end up with a tangle of wires not to mention the heat and noise that the things produce.

The easy way out of that is to use a KVM switch which which let’s you control lots of computers from one spot and these days you can even manage them over IP. Not only does this remove the hassle factor of being surrounded by them but you can move the computers to a controlled and secure environment.

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I’ve a nice 500MB memory card for my little baby computer that really shows its age when I say that it cost about $150 when I bought it yet that was only about five years ago.

Today of course we’re talking GB when we talk about flash memory and it’s getting to be so cheap that the suppliers usually start at several GB for even the cheapest cards these days. In fact, it’s now at the point where it would be considerably cheaper to just buy new cards than it ever was to buy the equivalent number of photographs on a roll of film.

However, as always with technology, we’re starting to get into incompatible standards so you need to have a good read at what your camera can handle before you decide to buy a massive memory card for it. If it’s more than a year or two old then your upper limit is 2GB and may be as low as 1GB. Anything beyond that and you need one that supports SDHC as all the latest high capacity SD cards conform to that.

But then, do you really need it anyway? My 10MP Nikon D40X can hold several hundred photos on a 2GB card even at the highest resolution settings. That’s the equivalent of around 10 36 exposure films. I never took more than that on even the longest holiday so although the camera can take SDHC cards I don’t see me needing any of them anytime soon.

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