Saturday, August 09, 2008

COMING SOON TO THIS BLOG
NOTE: The original Cray computer NASA used to plot and control man's trip to the moon had a capacity of 80 Megabits. It was about the size of your average bedroom and took three full time techs just to keep it running. To put that into perspective the small size Nano iPod has an 8 Gigabytes capacity. One gigabyte is one thousand Megabits. You can do the math. I just call that "a shit load" bigger.

I have recently been archiving some of my computer files. Or let me say re-archiving them. They have been stored on Zip Disks. At one point in time that was state of the art for home data storage. One hundred megabytes on a disk which is not much bigger than a floppy disk. I remember transferring some of those files from twenty megabyte Zip disks that were the size of an 8 x 10 sheet of paper and a quarter inch thick. They required a special drive to hold them. You could put two of these massive disks in the machine at once and have access to Forty additional megabytes of data. That was amazing.

The day I could get the contents of five of these massive disks onto one- one hundred megabyte Zip disk an eighth the size was even more amazing. I suddenly had much more shelf space.

So I am now putting that same information onto a 350 Gigabyte firewire drive about the size of a paper back book. Much more shelf space. The computer world is not getting bigger and better, it is getting smaller and faster.

I found that most of the stuff I am storing is art work and word files. I have saved a lot of stories, and memories. I have been blogging for a long time with no place to publish. For some reason I felt the need to save these writings. Well, now I have this blog so I have decided to publish some of the old stuff here. It may be the cyber equivalent of showing your own baby pictures, but a lot of the stuff I wrote back then was okay.

Some of it may be a little long to publish in one blog entry. There's one story that is about 14 pages long. So... I am planning to serialize the ones that are more than a couple of pages. Haven't quite figured out where the chapters will be or how to annotate them. That will come.

I figure it is better to publish the stories than have them collect Cantor's dust. I'm afraid that having them continually compressed into ever smaller and smaller space will eventually make them disappear, and if that happens, why did I waste all that shelf space.
As you were,
Jay

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