I can save the world

(To be read in an evangelical tone of voice) Friends, we gather today to talk about the power to save. Philosophers and wisemen throughout the ages have preached and expounded loudly on the wisdom—nay!—the wholesome goodness of the act of saving. Click for a man who has to save and he has only that document. Teach a man to save, and he can save bytes upon bytes upon bytes upon ... .

OK, I'm stepping down from the pulpit. I have a hard time speaking of computer issues like a fiery pulpit pounder. I guess I'm a different kind of fundamentalist. Anyway, the question left open by the computer high priests is where all the saved stuff is saved to or what the saved stuff is saved on. I have taken one step closer to answering that question. Open my desk drawer and you'll see floppy discs, thumb drives (recently dubbed "dip sticks" by my stats class; cute), and Zip discs. Since iPods double as external drives, I count my 2nd-gen iPod and 2nd-gen Shuffle as memory space in addition to my G5 iMac and an external drive. Let's add this up shall we? For the sake of rounding, I'll ignore the drawer half-full of floppies, the computer equivalent of pennies. I can't read them anyway. They're the 21st century version of matchbooks: excellent for balancing wobbly tables.

The memory is in the order in which it was acquired:
28 Zip discs at 100 MB each, a 20 GB iPod, a 250 GB G5 iMac, a 250 GB external drive, a 1 GB shuffle, and numerous dip sticks at 500 MB each.

The static version of memory not accounted for so far but important to the story are the 60+ 4GB dvds I have filled with audiobooks. This adds 240 GBs to the list above. The grand total of digital memory space I have accumulated thus far: ~765 GB.

This is why I have added a terabyte drive to the family. Yup, that's right: 1,000 GBs more room on which to save Save SAVE the world!!! bwa-ha-ha! If we go back to a unit that is perhaps more imaginable, 1 terabyte is equivalent to 1,000,000 MB or 1,000,000 floppies. Let's line 'em up for a family photo, shall we?

(the top of the list is a Zip disc representative; the 250 GB drive is partitioned into two pieces, both orange above)

Before you ask, no I will not even try to list all the stuff I have saved on all these discs and drives. Suffice it to say that I have plenty of media to keep myself amused for a good long time.