File Scales

I wrote a program that downloads Git pull request history from repos.

No big deal. It saves this to a JSON file.

Ok, seems normal.

It’s around 40MB.

🤷‍♂️

It’s weird to think how our perspective changes over time. The first hard drive I had was a 20MB SCSI drive that plugged into the side of my Commodore Amiga 500. That machine had 1.5MB of memory.

That was back around 1988 or so. Nearly 40 years ago.

The machine I’m writing this on has 1TB of storage and 64GB of RAM. Upstairs is a machine with twice both. In the rack in the basement is a NAS with nearly 60TB of storage.

The 40MB file is barely a rounding error. Loading a 40MB file into memory is a nothing.

I’m amazed at how much I’ve experienced in my lifetime. I’m grateful to have witnessed this.