…or…true confessions of an aging computer nerd…This tale jumps around over 4 decades…
I have been watching the Netflix series “Halt, and Catch Fire” (HCF), a fictional take on the computer and gaming industry as it exploded through the 80’s and 90’s, something which I was totally a part of. Starting at George Brown College on Sep 3 1980 until the dot-com meltdown in 2000, I barely ever came up for air. I was camping up north with my two brothers in 1995 and discovered this amazing guitar player SRV, only to learn he had already come and gone! With all my amazing ideas, I could have been a Bezos or Gates, but ended up being more like the two guys in the Netflix series at Comdex trying to sell dot-matrix computers…pretty funny, you have to see it.
In this 2010 to 2020 decade, the computer chips that are used in MicroSD cards and USB flash drives that give you extra memory or data portability on your phone, computer, or other devices, have evolved from 4 GB to 1000 GB (the Terabyte card!). While the industry-standard visible connections of MicroSD and USB devices has remained the same, they use an ever-changing and advancing technology inside that tiny multiple layers of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) with dozens of layers of the 1973 calculator version on a single surface, now intricately tying the layers vertically with thousands of wires a hundred times finer than a human hair. There are now a huge number of information storage cells buried in them which are etched into these silicon chips that measure about one centimeter square, which is the size of your little fingernail and about that thick. The amount of data would be like if you had a piece of screen from a window that was two miles by two miles square, with each little square containing one BIT of information! (I save the math to the end, so you can skip it).
My first venture into silicon chips was in 1980 when I yanked on a wall plug hanging out of a dumpster behind my 10-story apartment building, hoping to snip it off to fix perhaps a toaster or something. Out popped a calculator which I soon found out worked perfectly! Rather than start with the the two-wire low-tech 110 volt wall plug, I opened the calculator and reverse-engineered the keyboard functions by drawing out a wiring diagram entirely, then snipped the 25-wire ribbon cable free with scissors. I was then able to operate the calculator entirely by connecting two wires at a time in the severed wire. Next, I broke open the integrated circuit with vise grips, and I had my first amazing and life-changing view of a true-blue Integrated Circuit (IC) … a silicone micro-chip! I took this to the physics lab at George Brown College down on King Street near the Kensington Market, and used a stereo microscope to zoom in for a much closer look. In the bottom right hand corner was “1973”. Wow!!! Most of us were playing video games on the Grand Bend strip or using calculators with NO IDEA just how advanced we had already become. Realizing that I was never going to reverse-engineer the vast array of tiny capacitors, diodes, transistors, and wires, I started asking about a career as a hardware tech guy, but settled on programmer geek.
Forty years later, and after 10 years of renovating 100+ year old houses, I am back to my bit-twiddling past trying to catch up to my grand-kids and high-tech at the same time, still racing along (but the boing boing boing of Mario on their Nintendo is still the exact same sound…good things should never be changed!). I discovered how this Flash Memory works in an amazing video from “Branch Education”. You can watch it in the link below. I will explain how much information this is with my own “visualization technique for huge numbers” that I am developing as a foundation for many articles I plan to write on science.
The largest chips out there are now 1 terabyte (1 TB) and are quite pricey at almost $500 each, but worth it if you are a movie-maker doing drone shots. For one quarter the size, I picked one up for my old Galaxy S5 Neo phone at 256 GB for under $40. I use it as an iPod to a bluetooth speaker with 30,000+ mp3 music files. Drag and drop the entire folder from my computer to the phone in one shot and come back in 20 minutes…try doing that in iTunes…for free!
To comprehend what is almost impossible to fathom, I have a visualization technique starting a one-meter ruler: just over 1 yard long or 1,000 millimeters.
- If you were to take a one meter by one-meter sheet of paper and draw 1,000 lines side to side and 1,000 top to bottom, you will have a grid with 1 million little squares, 1 by 1 millimeter, just a bit finer than the average household window screen.
- A one-terabyte Micro SD card is a 10 millimeter square of silicon that makes up a computer chip, about the size of your little fingernail, and has 1 trillion bytes of information. With 8 bits per byte (zeros and ones, or ON /OFF), this comes to 8 trillion transistors. That is like having a 2.9 by 2.9 kilometer square covered in fine window screen each with a transistor in it. Or about 3 million rows each with 3 million transistors. The way these are ACTUALLY stored is a very complex 3 dimensional multi-layered chip…see the video from 2020 below…17 minutes.
To store each character in this text requires 8 BITS or one BYTE.
One Trillion: 1,000,000,000,000 BYTEs or eight trillion 8,000,000,000,000 BITS, 2.9 kilometers by 2.9 kilometers of millimeters.
Two raised to the power of 10 or two times itself ten times is over one thousand.
2 ^ 10 = 1,024 or a thousand
2 ^ 20 = 1,048,576 or a million (every ten powers of 2 increases about 1,000)
2 ^ 30 = 1,073,741,824 or a billion
2 ^ 40 = two times itself 40 times = 1,099,511,627,776 = 1 million times 1 million = 1 trillion
Times eight bits per byte = 8,796,093,022,208, or eight trillion, one thousand for each person on earth.
If you made it this far, you are probably somewhat of a nerd!
Some video links: (sorry…these YouTube links have ads in them…just Skip Ads if you like)
2011 Lexar manufacture in Iowa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meWLIDX7N-M
2020 Branch Education how Flash Memory works https://youtu.be/5Mh3o886qpg
2016 micro SD card filed down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmm790fXUyI
2018 Micro SD quality and speed: 10 minutes https://youtu.be/NpFWfluQiSA
Some notes on SD cards…
I just got a 256 GB card for my old Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo phone that no longer has a SIM card, I just use it for storing music and some Scientific American magazines for portable reading. You could fit all issues from 1845 to 2020 on less than half of the card!
In regular computer memory, which is higher quality than a MicroSD card, it is faster to process and more reliable, but requires electricity to be running through it. On the MicroSD cards the information is retained even with the power off because the electrons that hold the information are trapped in the “charge traps” .
I have found that SanDisk Ultra are very good. Wish, eBay, and Alibaba are know to sell FAKE cards with poor quality or way less memory than advertized! My latest MicroSD card for my Sony Handicam was the largest one I could fit in it, or 64 GB. The previous card which I bought with the camera at Walmart started failing, and it took me some time to realize why the camera would not work and videos where very pixely.
Note: I have several other articles in the works using visualization techniques to comprehend the very large or very small…like Just how far is it to the Andromeda Galaxy?
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