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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that if time traveler was possible, and someone came to the present day from the 1950s, that a microSD card would be one of the best ways to blow their mind. I still feel a bit of awe when I'm holding a fingernail sized piece of plastic that can contain all of Wikipedia with room to spare.

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There's a funny bit from a comedian named Shane Mauss about time travel that goes:

"... I wish I had a real time machine, I'd go back like 300 years ago, I'd bring some piece of modern technology to really wow them. I'd be like (in futurey sci-fi inflection) 'and this is called a computer!' and they would be all like 'yeah, computer that's neat... say is that time machine you just stepped out of? Because that is far more impressive'"

That bit isn't on Youtube but here he is explaining truck commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKSZsURPFyA

(I think I posted his stuff on another forum you frequent so you've probably seen it but the time machine talk is apt)

Forget the '50's. It would have blown my mind as a kid. If you told me there were more than 100 movies on something the size of a fingernail. And that they were higher quality than on my VHS tapes.

Without proof I never would have believed someone who even tried to tell me that.

Yep -- a person in the 50s may not have even had enough context to be as blown away by this as someone who knew about hard drives.

My earliest memory of a hard drive capacity -- about 21 years ago -- is 130 MB (although that most certainly wasn't the upper limit). So you could have told me "This card is 1/2000th the size and has 1000 times the capacity."

2,000,000 times the data density! That's doubled almost 21 times!

I remember buying, with my father, a 5mb Corvus hard drive. It was amazingly huge compared to the ~70kbyte floppy drive. I was in awe of how many documents it could hold.

Seeing this is just amazing.

Yeah my first harddrive was a 5 megabyte drive running off the side expansion port of an Amiga 500 -- I was pretty sure there was no way I'd ever fill that drive up when I first got it.

That was an A590. It came with a 20mb XT drive that made an annoying squeaking noise whenever it did a seek operation, but also had a SCSI connector which I eventually hooked a Quantum 100mb drive to.

Mine wasn't an A590, I was too poor to afford that at the time. I had some knock-off third-party unit I bought at the "local" (not really local, but closest one to where I lived) Amiga store (Memory Location in Wellesley, MA).

Worked pretty well, as far as I can remember.

a microSD card would probably impress some guys at IBM, but take an iPhone (and the internet) and you'll blow everyone's mind. Just google maps alone in the palm of your hand is amazing. iPhone (or any hand held computer) plus wikipedia, google maps and of course tumblr for cats and people in the 50's would likely either kill you or start a cult for you. (or in the case of Jesus, both)

'take the internet'? That's quite a lot of stuff you're taking with you, from layer 1 all the way up. You couldn't 'take the internet' even with a giant fleet of trucks.

How about a series of pipes? Will that work?

Unfortunately an iPhone taken back to the 1950s is going to be a local-apps-only affair.

Even showing off the hardware would be hard.

"Lemme show you the awesome pictures I can take with this iPhone, right plug this cable into your computer's USB por.......oh"

I glanced down at my Nexus 7 last night while walking and realised how futuristic stuff is. It seems so light and handy, and I said that about the previous N7 last year.

In '96, I only had 1GB of storage total in my PC, across several hard drives. I thought that was amazingly huge.

In 96 I upgraded my 200mb internal to 2G. I felt like the Queen of England for a good couple of years with that.

What's great about these microSDs is that you can put them anywhere - cameras, sensor devices whathaveyou. Maybe one day we really will have enough data to understand the world.

How many people in the 1950s could really comprehend what 128 GB is? You'd have to resort to terrible Library of Congresses or Volkswagen full of core memory analogies.

The other thing to consider is that in 60 years from now, would the data on that microSD still be there? Many books from the 1950s are still perfectly readable today (I have several), I also have some floppies from the 80s whose contents are intact, but what about modern high-density NAND flash, which is inherently unstable? Will it have mostly erased itself in a few decades?

Sure, but you would also have to bring along a phone/tablet to show it off, or laptop/adapter.

Then how would you prove it had that much data? You can fake a sd card right now to show it has a huge amount of data on it.

I can hold up a piece of dust and claim it can hold 20tb, but no one will believe me.

That piece of dust might well hold 20Tb of dead genetic material from whatever created it... consider that a single human cell contains 3.2Gb of data in its DNA.

> a single human cell contains 3.2Gb of data in its DNA

DNA is actually closer to 750MB (2.9 billion base pairs, 2 bits to one DNA sequence, so one byte to four sequences). Of course, a cell has other things going on in it (mitochondrial DNA, etc, so overall you're probably still right!

Mitochondrial DNA is only 17k base pairs. More important is the two main DNA copies per cell. But if you really want impressive numbers look at certain species of amphibians and plants that reach the 100 billion base pair range.

The total storage is impressive enough, but what keeps amazing me is that today I toss around 4 gig files like they're nothing. Those are bigger than the entire disk array my medical imaging research lab had when I was a grad student.

My cousin is often profoundly amazed by GB large usb keys. He (We) went through many steps in perception of digital data. I think someone from the 50s would have a hard time realizing what it could mean.

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