A Time of Magic

One of the most noticeable improvements in computer technology is in the area of portable storage media.

Those with long careers in the computer industry may recall the likes of the PDP8 of the late 1970s which sported a 2MB (yes two megabyte) hard disk some fourteen inches across and costing something like £10,000. These days even if you buy the cheapest flash drive you’ll be taking in terms of gigabytes and a price of under a tenner.

However, despite all that improvement in portability and capacity people are, if anything, less careful about safeguarding their information. One wonders just how many people have lost all their digital photos already simply because they didn’t bother to update the storage media?

Although you can obviously reuse the digital storage from, say, your camera it’s now so cheap that you may as well keep the original on the card after you copy it onto your computer and thus create a backup with no effort at all.

Although more and more of our lives is spent online few people bother to backup any of it and thus, sooner or later, something is sure to go wrong and you’ll end up losing all kinds of stuff that you didn’t realise that you needed.

One of the ways to avoid the hassle element of backup is to do it online. That’s only recently become a truly practical activity with the increase in line speeds just about everywhere and when you add to that the rapidly decreasing cost of storage there are even free online backup services these days so there’s no excuse.

Obviously you’ll get less storage space and facilities on the free services but that “less” might well be enough for the essential files that you have.

Long ago computers just came in black or beige or whatever the latest “in” colour was at the time but things have moved on a lot since then.

For one thing, with the falling price of computers they’ve started to acquire some of the aspects of fashion accessories. Thus we have the deliberately cute range of Sony Vaio computers which do all that a normal computer does but in a much cuter form factor that lets Sony get away with charging more for a comparable amount of computer power than other manufacturers can get away with.

But is it worth getting one of these cute computers? Well, if you want more of a fashion accessory than something with a whole lot of computer power then it’s the way to go for you. After all, I’m quite happy with my cute little Aspire One despite it being quite underpowered as computers go and the Sonys are a good deal more powerful than it is.