I recently purchased an 18TB Seagate external hard drive, not because I had any expectation of ever needing 18 terabytes of local data storage, but because at $249, it just seemed like too good a deal to pass up.
You see, my reference point for all personal technology is my 1987 Tandy 1000HX personal computer from Radio Shack. The 1000HX was pretty cool for its time. It had an Intel 8088 processor running at 7.16 MHz, 512K of RAM (expandable to 640K!), a 3.5-in. 720K floppy drive, and MS-DOS built in. The one thing it didn’t have was a hard drive. It did, however, have an expansion slot through which one could connect an external Tandy 5.25-in. floppy drive if one so desired.
Big Storage
A little cottage industry of after-market devices to hang off that expansion slot soon sprung up. Since there was no Google or Amazon back then, I don’t remember how I found it, but I was ecstatic to find a 20MB (20 whole megabytes!) external hard drive for my 1000HX for a mere $500. Don’t ask me where I came up with $500 for a hard drive, either. I’m going to have to assume that our young family had to endure a couple of seasons with no new shoes.
You can see where I’m going with this. In 1987, I paid $500 for a 20MB hard drive. In 2025, I paid half that for an 18TB hard drive. I won’t walk you through all the math, but if I were to pay 1987 per-megabyte prices for my new Seagate drive, it would’ve set me back $470,000,000, give or take. Mind blown.
The Need for Speed
Throughout my computing life, my top two concerns have always been the size of my hard drive and the speed of my online connection. My first modem – which of course required that I hijack the family phone line – ran at 1200 baud. In optimum conditions, it took about 2.5 hours to download the 1.32MB shareware version of Wolfenstein. Sadly, optimum conditions rarely existed, so Wolfenstein required several attempts. Needless to say, I upgraded to a blazing 2400 baud modem as soon as I could afford it.
Back in those days, it was every computer nerd’s dream to have a commercial-grade T1 line running straight into their computer room. Just how fast was a T1 line? Do you remember? It was a whopping 1.544 Mbps. That’s certainly fast compared to 1200 baud. But this is 2025.
On a typical day, I can get about 200 Mbps of download speed from my cable modem. That means my cable modem is about 165,000 times faster than my first modem. Just to put that into perspective, it would take about 16 weeks for my old modem to download what I can download in a minute today. And in case you’re wondering, my cable modem is about 130 times faster than the coveted T1. Mind blown – again.
The Portability Factor
In those early days, it never occurred to me that I’d one day be carrying around a supercomputer in my hip pocket. Yet here I sit with my iPhone 16 Pro Max in hand. Just how super is that handheld computer?
You may have heard this comparison before, but it fits well here. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which controlled the guidance system for the first lunar landing, operated at .043 MHz, had 2KB of RAM, and had 36KB of ROM. Just as notable, it weighed about 70 pounds and was the size of a small refrigerator.
We’ve already determined that my iPhone fits in my pocket. The amazing thing is that stuffed into that small form factor is an A18 Pro chip that features six cores – two high-performance cores clocked at 4.04 GHz each and four “efficient” cores running at 2.2 GHz each. I’ll short-cut the math again and tell you that just in terms of sheer clock speed, my iPhone is about 4,000 times faster than the AGC. And of course, my iPhone can do so much more than land a spaceship on the moon. I can stream all nine seasons of Suits, ffs. Bottom line: I really do have a rocket in my pocket.
AI – The Fourth Leg of the Personal Tech Table
Over the years, I’ve taken on the role of first-line tech support for my entire family. It’s a role I cherish because I enjoy dinking around and solving problems and figuring things out. And I’m proud to say that I’ve never been beat. It may take hours, days, or even weeks, but I always figure it out. In the immortal words of Randy Bachman, “I’m a real troubleshooter and I blow it away.”
Google and YouTube have proved useful in this endeavor, but sometimes it’s difficult to find a video or discussion board that describes the exact problem you’re experiencing. And sometimes that small difference is just enough to really piss you off.
Enter Gemini, my new favorite troubleshooting collaborator. As one example, I recently found two 2TB NAS drives in the back of a closet, one from Seagate and one from Buffalo. They haven’t been in service in at least 10 years, but I decided to bring them back to life. Why – especially given that I just deployed an 18TB hard drive? I don’t have a good answer for that. I guess I didn’t want the NAS drives to be lonely.
Not surprisingly, most of what I knew about wrangling network attached storage drives was purged years ago, leading to initial failure in this resurrection effort. No problem for Gemini. I told it the specific model number for each drive, and it provided detailed guidance for each. The amazing thing is that the whole process seemed very collaborative. I’d ask a question and Gemini might ask me to clarify. If it suggested one thing that didn’t work, I’d tell it so, and it would suggest something else. It was a true back and forth.
Would I have figured it all out using legacy methods (Google and YouTube)? I’m sure I would have, but based on past experience, I believe this effort that took me a couple of hours would have taken me all weekend. As a self-employed individual, my time really is money. So when I discover I can reduce a two-day project to two hours, I get really excited. That gives me more time to offer you boring history lessons like this one.