This morning I rode an FX on my way to work, as I have been doing in the past X months. I needed to occupy the front seat because that’s my favorite spot whenever I bring a book during my morning commute. (Reading while seated at the back, where the seats are placed sideways, makes me really dizzy). I noticed this little thing stuck in the slot meant to be used for lighting cigarettes, and it has the universal symbols for play, pause, forward and rewind. So I guessed it some music player. Inserted in this player is something we are all familiar by now - a thumb drive aka usb drive or flash drive or simply that thing we have that we’re always hesitant to lend to our co-workers or insert in their usb ports, because of this major fear of pesky viruses.
Anyway, Mr. FX’s storage device apparently is full of music from Gwen Stefani and Ace of Base. I’m not sure if it’s his, but I caught him lip synching to some “It’s a Beautiful Life.” Not that there’s something wrong with liking Ace Of Base. I like Ace Of Base! I used to hunt recordable cassettes around our house, pop it inside the player and hit record button whenever “The Sign” comes blaring on the radio. So I had a tape-full of The Sign, in all available mixes, with the FM stations’ audio tags, and some DJ intros and outros. (Mr. FX also played a silly Ace of base song called Life is a Flower and I imagined it to be a good end credit song for a movie I’ll soon make. Heh)
Back to the USB storage device, it’s a wonder that we can now carry so much data with little things like these. Why didn’t they think of this long ago. I remember back in high school, we only have that ancient fossil called floppy diskettes, which were literally, floppy. We never really got the importance of the data were putting in them, we just know we can use DIR slash ON or OS with them on the A prompt. AND! We can write protect them by covering a little slot with little black stickers.
Then we had these relatively smaller disks which were no longer floppy, but still write-protectable with an AMAZING sliding mechanism at the side. I used this kind of storage until college, and its usefulness became much clearer to me with the advent of that thing called WINDOWS and OFFICE. I could actually carry documents in my pocket! But the storage space was somewhat limited, with Windows making me save 1 Adobe Pagemaker file in 3 different disks, then I’d need all these three disks to form the file together again in another PC. Wow.
And then I went to work in an industry where data file amounts to revenue. We make ads. We make billboards. And how do we fit a real-size file for a billboard in one disk? The magic was then called a ZIP DISK used on ZIP Drives. I Started wanting one of those, thinking how many music or videos I can store (Yes, before Youtube, we actually have the need to collect videos in our own storage). But those zip things were very expensive. So there came the much much cheaper CD-R.
CD-Rs were a luxury then. Until CD-R King became an underground sensation among techno geeks, and it became so sensational, it went totally mainstream. Now everyone knows CD-R King to be the best place for cheap storage solutions. But that’s skipping a lot in this evolutional blog entry. Haha.
After the CD-R was the CD-RW, and then there was the DVD variety for those who have an insatiable need to store things. Like me. Haha. When I switched office, I had to take with me my IMesh-Kazaa-Limewire goodies. Wow. All the nights spent burning, not the midnight oil.
And somewhere during my fascination with all kinds of CDs, varieties of memory sticks, memory cards and others made their Genesis. I lost track of their sequence. I wasn’t one of their users then. Cause to use them, you’ll need some multimedia gadgets aka things I don’t have.
And still somewhere in between my days using these shiny and round with a hole in the center storage media, the usb thing was born. They used to sell for a thousand pesos at the minimum, but now you can have a 1 gig variety, for about P300. And they’re becoming smaller and smaller. I saw a 2gig micro SD just the other day and it’s even smaller than my thumb nail. The actual thumb nail, not thumbnail as a computer lingo. And if you eat it, you’ll be swallowing a lot of data.
Wow. Did I just write a long one? Such history in a short span of time.
Anyway, Mr. FX’s storage device apparently is full of music from Gwen Stefani and Ace of Base. I’m not sure if it’s his, but I caught him lip synching to some “It’s a Beautiful Life.” Not that there’s something wrong with liking Ace Of Base. I like Ace Of Base! I used to hunt recordable cassettes around our house, pop it inside the player and hit record button whenever “The Sign” comes blaring on the radio. So I had a tape-full of The Sign, in all available mixes, with the FM stations’ audio tags, and some DJ intros and outros. (Mr. FX also played a silly Ace of base song called Life is a Flower and I imagined it to be a good end credit song for a movie I’ll soon make. Heh)
Back to the USB storage device, it’s a wonder that we can now carry so much data with little things like these. Why didn’t they think of this long ago. I remember back in high school, we only have that ancient fossil called floppy diskettes, which were literally, floppy. We never really got the importance of the data were putting in them, we just know we can use DIR slash ON or OS with them on the A prompt. AND! We can write protect them by covering a little slot with little black stickers.
Then we had these relatively smaller disks which were no longer floppy, but still write-protectable with an AMAZING sliding mechanism at the side. I used this kind of storage until college, and its usefulness became much clearer to me with the advent of that thing called WINDOWS and OFFICE. I could actually carry documents in my pocket! But the storage space was somewhat limited, with Windows making me save 1 Adobe Pagemaker file in 3 different disks, then I’d need all these three disks to form the file together again in another PC. Wow.
And then I went to work in an industry where data file amounts to revenue. We make ads. We make billboards. And how do we fit a real-size file for a billboard in one disk? The magic was then called a ZIP DISK used on ZIP Drives. I Started wanting one of those, thinking how many music or videos I can store (Yes, before Youtube, we actually have the need to collect videos in our own storage). But those zip things were very expensive. So there came the much much cheaper CD-R.
CD-Rs were a luxury then. Until CD-R King became an underground sensation among techno geeks, and it became so sensational, it went totally mainstream. Now everyone knows CD-R King to be the best place for cheap storage solutions. But that’s skipping a lot in this evolutional blog entry. Haha.
After the CD-R was the CD-RW, and then there was the DVD variety for those who have an insatiable need to store things. Like me. Haha. When I switched office, I had to take with me my IMesh-Kazaa-Limewire goodies. Wow. All the nights spent burning, not the midnight oil.
And somewhere during my fascination with all kinds of CDs, varieties of memory sticks, memory cards and others made their Genesis. I lost track of their sequence. I wasn’t one of their users then. Cause to use them, you’ll need some multimedia gadgets aka things I don’t have.
And still somewhere in between my days using these shiny and round with a hole in the center storage media, the usb thing was born. They used to sell for a thousand pesos at the minimum, but now you can have a 1 gig variety, for about P300. And they’re becoming smaller and smaller. I saw a 2gig micro SD just the other day and it’s even smaller than my thumb nail. The actual thumb nail, not thumbnail as a computer lingo. And if you eat it, you’ll be swallowing a lot of data.
Wow. Did I just write a long one? Such history in a short span of time.
2 comments:
Nice post! Aylavet! Naka-relate ako eh!
u never fails to entertain haha..yeah i can relate, basura na ang mga floppy disks at cd-r collection ko, i stopped buying pirated dvds now that i can fit 6 movie avi files in 1 dvd-r. and soon it will be in the junk too, kasi meron na namang youtube, etc. no need to store too much..o ayan long comment din ito. haha!
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