I still think it's wild how much data can fit on a microSD nowadays. People would think you were crazy if you told them just a few decades ago.

it's more than wild man. It's magical! Just yesterday or the day before my 700KB or so Amiga floppy seemed like it would last forever...

We now have 1TB microSD cards.

I still finding it hard to trust 1TB worth of important data stored in that medium. I'm half joking but still, only half joking. The other half is dead serious.

* * *

It is always a bad idea to store any amount of important data on a single medium.

Seen too many (including myself at some point) have all their data in one external HDD and pass it around friends with a caution to be safe with their data.

I've lost most of my photo and video collection due to two HDD failures between 2017-2020.

You can raid 1 it and backup right?

SD cards for me is just a medium to transfer from a device to permanent storage so I don't have to worry about data retention on a tiny device unless it get lost.

Wasn't it just the day before yesterday that Bill Gates famously said nobody would ever need more than 64 KB storage?

It /is/ amazing the progress we've seen in our lifetimes. I remember life before the web (http) was invented, before mobile phones (much less smartphones) became commonplace.

Some of the supposed 'progress' is really regression---like the number of people who economically could productively use computers but think a mainstream smartphone can let them do the same things. Sure, they can web browse, access online banking, ticketing, commerce, and other services through apps, but they usually miss out on the entire creative and productive side of computing.

However, I don't just blame technology. At least in Occidental countries, we tell ourselves we're consumers, vocabulary that hides the fact we're also producers/creators in our work. But it fits a mechanistic view of society, and works well with the central planners Utopian pretensions.

I love hearing of projects like the OPs---breathing new life into unused machines.

It was! It was exactly the day before yesterday when he said that. I remember. I started my "career" doing "multimedia" in the 90s. Macromedia Director programming. I also remember those who had a 486 and that one guy who had 486DX. I remember seeing the "web" for the first time somewhere in 1994. I also remember looking at my friend asking if he thinks anyone will ever make money off this thing. We both said "Naahhhhh" at the same time and laughed.

Projects like this bring it all back.

It was 640kb and he didn't really ever say that.:)

MicroSDs and even thumb drives are INSANE. I remember how difficult it used to be to move large amounts of data reliably. Superdisks, Zip drives, CD-R/RW, and on and on. Portable storage solutions were an absolute nightmare for ages.

I was thinking back on this the other day and I remembered my iPod Classic with the 1.8" HDD in it. Boggles the mind how that thing didn't just immediately die. The number of 2.5" drives I've lost in laptops and external drives over the years...

IIRC, the 1.8 inch drives were designed to take a beating. I think they had circuitry that would actively protect the platters from the drive heads when jostled(?)

I have a Sony Vaio from around 2003 with a 1.8" HDD. A beautiful machine. Still works. The HDD is very slow though... it was ok back then.

Indeed. Johnny Mnemonic needs only swallow a MicroSD, rather than getting his brain modified, if he wants to smuggle 320 GiB of data.

It's the exit strategy of this approach that make it unappealing...

Any Linux distribution that can be configured to be minimal (e.g. NixOS, Arch Linux, etc.) can boot a mainstream stack (systemd + pulseaudio + Xorg + tiling window manager) in less than 300 MB RAM. It's a great experience. I use an old NUC (i5-4250U) as a daily driver and it's almost as fast as a new machine for regular tasks, it feels like the OP's.

I always get whiplash seeing people mention hardware newer than the stuff in my server rack, which I would consider to be high-performance, and call it "old" and describe daily driving it as if it's a nearly unbelievable phenomenon

Well that's a bit unfair. Lots of CPUs slightly older than the one I pointed out will struggle a lot as a daily driver since they will lack hardware support for lots of functionality, e.g. video decoding.

Also that CPU is ultra low power, like those on laptops, and it doesn't age nearly as well as server stuff.

>I distinctly remember the happiness of attaching a 512KB RAM expansion card to my Amiga, bringing total RAM to 1MB.

I thought the same (A500, new enough to have the Agnus variant and jumper to make it 1MB chip total). It happens a lot when it's about memory.

1MB was so much RAM, relative to just 512KB. It could suddenly run Monkey Island and Sherman M4, and it was suddenly much easier to work with Deluxe Paint and Prowrite.

I got the 4MB card for mine, since I worked at a computer shop and could get a staff discount. The only catch was that you had to solder a wire from that to the motherboard, which I had done with one of those trigger-operated soldering guns, and just about screwed the pooch. Lifted a trace off the board, taped it back down.

There was also the IDE hard drive interface that I thought was ingenious; it was a daughter board in the 68000 socket, under the CPU, with a ribbon cable connector beside the CPU socket, and the main chips between the legs of the CPU socket.

These days, that same A500 has an ECS Denise, a 68010, 8M FAST RAM, 1M CHIP, 1.5M SLOW.

Oh, I had the 68010, not the rest though, since it was drop-in compatible. I gave mine to a friend, wonder what became of that thing. Such a nice little machine.

I cut my initial programming teeth on an 8Mhz (Maybe?) 8086 with 512KB RAM. Had the luxury of a 20MB HDD. At the time it felt like an ocean of storage. Nowadays it can be transferred around the world in less than a second.