Memory Sticks... Have Changed!

Back in the day, we stored computer data on floppy disks, a term that is probably obsolete now! Then people began to burn data on CDs. Before I left the teaching profession, I remember the staff meeting where the principal gave every teacher a memory stick on a lanyard. Most of us non-computer types were shocked to discover that this little plastic thing would hold all our teaching material and then some. (The idea was that all our personal data should be stored on it, so that we could share computers, using whichever computer was available when we wanted to use it. Giving us all memory sticks was cheaper than providing each of us with a desk-top computer.)

This is my school-issued memory stick. It holds 128 megabytes. I copied all my classwork files on it when I retired almost 5 years ago - and it held everything, with room to spare!

But nowadays I need a memory stick to hold back-up copies of photos, not school work... (Each photo takes up about 3 or 4 megabytes, give or take, depending on the resolution of the photo (compared to 25 kilobytes for a page of typing). A Google search tells me that 1 megabyte is the same as 1024 kilobytes, so my memory 128 megabyte memory stick can hold the information on over 5000 pages of paper but far fewer photographs.

So after my recent computer crisis when I thought I had lost all my stored photos when my computer crashed (see yesterday's blog post)... I went out to get a new memory stick on which to store all my photos...














Here it is - my (blue) 16 gigabyte storage device!















Smaller than my thumb-nail - yet it holds 2000 times more!*

*If my math is correct: One gigabyte is the same as 1024 megabytes!