1995

 Back around 1995 I was a section head in the Scientific Computing Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder Colorado, a national lab sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Besides leading VIPs around on tours, at that time I was involved in helping write proposals, papers (one of which was the featured article in the Proceedings of the IEEE), patent applications, and design documents for a terabyte hierarchical Mass Storage System, the next generation of NCAR's groundbreaking data storage architecture. The existing NCAR MSS had a floor-full of offline tapes and tape drives, several robotic tape silos, and a pile of disk drives. That is what it took to feed data to NCAR's several supercomputers and to soak up the results. A terabyte was an almost unbelievable amount of storage at the time.

This morning I'm continuing to work on my latest project, which incorporates a two terabyte Solid State Disk - no moving parts - so small it would easily fit in my shirt pocket. I bought it off Amazon because our local office supply store only had the one terabyte model of the same drive, and I needed something larger. The SSD is USB attached to an equally pocket-sized US$75 Raspberry Pi 4B Single Board Computer, which also provides all of the SSD's power.

1995 just doesn't seem that long ago.