I was walking to the store and was thinking about my flash drive in my pocket and realized that it was the equivalent of 2700 floppies. And that's a small (4GB) thumb drive.

Punched tape on a MOS KIM-1 being my first experience with "mass" storage. A 4GB flash drive equals over 6,000 miles of punched tape.

If a character is one byte then it would take over twelve years to read in 4GB.

I cut my teeth on punch cards on the university mainframe back in the seventies. Assuming IBM 80 character cards and 143 cards per inch then 4GB works out to 29,137 feet. About the same height as Mt. Everest.

It's a grand scale automated continuity tester. I worked with one about 25 years ago. It had 3 attached I/O devices: a 10 MB HDD, a dumb terminal and punched tape. When the heads crashed and the disk needed to be replaced, how long was the tape to save 3.7 MB?



Just in case you're wondering who'd be willing to pay for this foolishness; you did! It was a government contractor.

first time to hear from it