Peak demand and bandwidth

It's amazing how just this week there was talk in the news about the world's first 1 Terabyte hard disk drive expected to be offered for sale soon by Hitachi.

1 Terabyte.

That's a far cry from the first PC I bought way back in the day. It was a 386SX33 with a 3.5" floppy drive and I think maybe a 20 MB hard disk drive. It looked a bit like this.



At the time it was a speed demon. Now it's just hard to believe that anything productive ever came out of a machine like that. In all truth, given what I used it for, nothing productive actually did come out of it but that's hardly the point.

Anyway, I have distinct memories of the next decent PC I had. It was a Dell something plex with a 486DX66 processor and a whopping 270MB hard drive.

I think I might be giving away my age here :-)

Those were joyous times, with the "breathtaking" performance matched only by the raw excitement that comes from knowing that at any moment the following could happen.


Since about 5 years ago I have lost interest in the whole speed thing when it comes to computers.

Lately while trying to burn DVD movie discs (my own creations people, nothing untoward I assure you) I've rediscovered how important it is to have a really fast and up to date system. Hence the need for me to get that 24" iMac I mentioned previously.

Anyway, despite all the best efforts of users to keep their systems up to date, it never ceases to amaze me how websites seem to really slow down whenever there is a big news item.

It happened during 9/11, I remember it vividly. It happened during the world cup last time around. It happened during the bombings in London. But it's not limited to major news or incidents.

Take the big hoo-ha today surrounding the Apple expo show in the US. I went to the Apple website to see what all the fuss was about and it sure was slow.

I expect there to be loads of interest but it just strikes me as amazing despite the incredible gains in computing power since those early days it's still difficult to manage a sudden surge in demand for information.

They also did something tday that I thought was interesting. Jobs announced at the end of the show that they are dropping the word 'computer' from the company name. From now on it will be known as Apple Inc.

Could they be sending a message to someone that they believe the time has passed for the computer as we know it?