Well not mine exactly but memory in general. Many of you have never played a phonograph record, but that’s all we had for music the first 70 years of the 1900s. Change is one thing, its first derivative, the speed of change, the rate at which change is happening, is accelerating.
Consider that by the 1960s we had moved to from records to reel to reel tapes to 8 track tape cartridges . While this didn’t store any more information, it was a lot handier and quickly appeared in automobiles. Cassettes followed which allowed the tape to be wound tighter and one could record on them, something not possible on e tracks. The ability to record what one wanted to hear caused a real boom in cassette decks which quickly appeared in both home and auto settings. But again, while one could record more music, and they were and are available in different lengths, cassettes can hold;d up to 120 minutes of music while CDs only do 80 minutes. The music CD took the quality of sound to a much higher level by going digital as opposed to the mechanical or analog signals on previous media.
The introduction of the magnetic disk or floppy drive really got things going. Now information could be easily recorded and with the hard case 3.5 inch disk developed by Sony, easily moved. As you can see reading these articles, much of this technology had been going on at the same time, such as the large laser disk for movies. The 3.5 inch drive could hold 1.44 MB in its final design. Iomega introduced the Zip drive which was expanded from 100 to 250 and 750 MB. I have a shoe box full of 100 and 250 MB zips that a friend gave me this summer. I thought that would be all the storage imaginable.
Whoops, now we have the USB flash drives as well as a host of memory cards, xD, sD, compact flash, and my smart media cards have already been eclipsed as not offering enough storage. I saw a 2 gigabyte device this week for 45 bucks,
And now nanotechnology is giving us miniature hard drives that plug into USB ports that hold 30 GBs of memory.
Okay, I assume more memory will be available in the near future. What does that mean for your life and for business in general? What is the opportunity there that did not exist before? Certainly storing movies and entertainment are obvious answers. But so is storing encyclopedias and your entire college library. The concept of a living family photo album comes to mind-why not do digital video or stills of family members overlaid with their comments about their lives? Future generations could get to know ever so great granddad or grand mom in a way never before possible. Is there a business possibility here? Ditto for the family dog that could join in the fun, I mean my wife talks to the cats all the time!
Dennis Elam
Professor Elam 
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