In the first half of 1970, fairly soon after I joined IBM Australia, they announced the IBM System/370 mainframe for enterprises use, and the IBM System/3 minicomputer for use by small organizations (announced mid-a969 in the USA).

For the new mainframes, they also announced the IBM 3330 disk storage, for those days having a massive 800 MB capacity, plus the 2000-lines-per-minute IBM 3211 line printer. Does anybody still print reports that consume box after box of stationery, I wonder? A typical S/370 configuration would set you back only a few million US dollars (and that's 1970 dollars, remember).

The base System/3 had 4 KB (kilobytes) of magnetic core storage and a single-platter disk drive with a 2.5 MB capacity. The S/3 could have up to an additional three core storage modules and/or disk drives, for a staggering maximum memory of 16 KB and a colossal 10 MB of disk -- if you could afford the $50,000 and above prices, that is!

Here we are at the very start of 2009, where such miniscule processing and storage capabilities are hard to comprehend, much less the ultra expensiveness. A run-of-the-mill notebook PC costing less than $500 today would easily outperform either of these antique systems!

That's Moore's Law at work for you — ever smaller, faster, cheaper devices of all sorts, with no end in sight quite yet.

On 07 January, 2009,  SanDisk Corporation and Sony Corporation announced the joint development of two expanded formats that will shape the flash memory landscape for years to come.

“Memory Stick format for Extended High Capacity (Tentative name)” expands the “Memory Stick PRO” format series to achieve a maximum storage capacity of 2-terabytes (TB), while the “Memory Stick HG Micro” format enables a maximum data-transfer speed of 60 megabytes per second (MB/s), making it one of the fastest-smallest memory card formats to date.

Format licensing corresponding to the “Memory Stick format for Extended High Capacity” and the “Memory Stick HG Micro” is scheduled to start in 2009.

The demand for high-capacity memory cards capable of storing high-resolution pictures and videos is increasing as the image quality of high-definition digital still cameras, DSLR cameras, and camcorders continues to evolve.

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