And, no, those are NOT my very well-manicured nails! :)
Anyway this thing - which costs about $199.00 - has been great to keep nearby as I'm coming up with new songs or guitar parts. It uses a SD (Secure Digital) card - same kind as I use in my little digital camera - so they are interchangeable). And for another $10 I bought a 1GB card. One GB seems small now for an amount of storage. that thought leads me to a very brief sentimental journey back through computing and the digital history of the last twenty years...
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It is amazing how technology has become so powerful and inexpensive. In 1987 my family bought an Apple IIc with 4KB (!) of memory.
I bought my next computer in 1992 - a Mac Plus - as a sophomore in college. It had 1MB of memory - I was VERY proud! Remember these?...
I do think it's interesting how the older Apple looks much more up-to-date (even when compared with today's machines) than the Mac does. Hummm...
Here's an interesting site with a very comprehensive list of Apple Computer History.
As you probably all remember, computers were so novel and exotic back in those halcyon days of yore, that we felt like surely galactic travel could not be far off!
Well, galactic travel is still just as far off, and now I am drowning in gadgets: 1 - IBM 486 PC, 2 - Windows95 PC's, 3 - Windows98 PC's, 1 - WindowsXP PC and 1 WindowsXP Laptop, 1 Windows Vista PC... I still have my old Apple IIc and a Mac Quadra (1994). So, I have computers popping out of my ears! I also have countless old printers, fax machines, scanners, telephones, calculators, stereos, TV's and a whole laundry basket of remotes. And I'm just one guy. Sit back and ponder just how much stuff is out there.
The Apple IIc cost like $1300 back in the late 1980's. My Vista (factory refurb) cost $286! Granted, I didn't have to buy a monitor with it (since I had four or five floating around)!!
Now technology moves TOO fast. As witless consumers we just can't seem to keep up with how quickly things become obsolete.
There was an excellent article in National Geographic about computer recycling around the world: High Tech Trash. Unfortunately that link doesn't show all the incredible photos, graphs and charts that were in the magazine (well, it might but I didn't surf through the whole online article).
I keep all my old electronic gear because I can't stand to see such intricately manufactured things simply tossed on the garbage heap.
In the next few years there will be quantum computers (and possibly nine other weird computing technologies coming).
Here is a simplistic History of Computers from 3000 B.C. up to today.
The trend for data storage (and retrieval) seems to be running toward the solid state (no-moving-parts) direction for consumer products. SD cards (like the ones I spoke about above) can hold up to 32GB (that's 4000 CD's worth of data storage), and more storage will be on its way as working scales shrink. In my opinion, in ten years there will be no use for CD's, DVD's, tapes, and possibly even hard drives, unless hard drives are still considerably cheaper than solid state cards, which I very much doubt.
The typical computer hard drives that we all know and love are strange little creatures! They are constructed in "clean rooms", and their surfaces remain clean for there whole existence. But they are very "shy". Here's is what the private parts of a hard drive look like... Oh, MY! :)
Pretty sexy, huh? But the only useful hard drive is a VIRGIN hard drive. They are not meant to be violated by contamination caused by unscrewing their covers. If you were actually looking at the "bits and pieces" of your own hard drive, to the point where you saw it as it is displayed in the photo above, you should next understand that you have inevitably ruined the device. Because of my cat-like curiosity, I can speak from personal experience on this. ;)
Still, the hard drive is a VERY efficient way to store data, because it can be much less expensive than solid state devices and hold IMMENSE amounts of information - up to 1TB (1 terabyte = 1000 GB's). Unfortunately for hard drives it seems there is a point where retrieval becomes unreliable. This is not because of space, but because of heat.
The fastest hard discs today are zipping around at about 15,000 RPM (Revolutions Per Second). There have been experiments with 20,000 RPM (and even faster) discs. But all kinds of problems start to creep in... heat builds up. Here is something I never knew about how hard drives work:
Amazingly it is all about air! The so-called "discs" are actually called platters. These platters can be stacked up like old LP's in a juke box. For each platter there is a delicate arm that is capable of moving all the way across the width of the write surface.
The platters are made of non-magnetic materials (aluminum or glass) and coated with a thin magnetized layer.
As the platters spin so does all the air in the semi-sealed chamber. It is the movement of this air that lifts the arm, causing it to "float". At the same time the read/write head is aerodynamically designed to travel at a very precise distance above the surface of the platter, a distance much much smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
There is even an air intake and exhaust system. This is two tiny holes one that lets air in and one that lets it out. This air is thoroughly cleaned by the very fine filtration system it must pass through. So you see... Opening the cover allows dust in, and if the head ever runs against a piece of dust it will fail to work correctly and will ruin itself. There are professional means of sanitizing platters but they are not generally used by average consumers.
Luckily, one of the hard drive's greatest early advantages over temporary (RAM types of) memory, is that it is a non-volatile storage system. It retains the data even after power is shut off.
To be fair, I have to now show the innards of the SD card...
Not quite as sexy. You can't see anything doing anything... It is quite boring. I think its scale says it all though. An SD card is roughly the size of a quarter. The hard drive we saw is considerably bigger. Even my laptop's very small (in size) 60GB drive is still the size of a deck of cards.
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Anyway... Getting back to the new recorder...
This new Zoom H2 has also been a nice higher-quality way for me to keep a dream log. I have just begun a new one, with the first entry listed below.
The only thing I have to point out before you listen, is that I am occasionally very frank and personal about what happens in these dream logs. This is because I'm trying to record as much as I can about the WHOLE experience, rather than editing it or sanitizing it. I understand this leaves me open to ridicule, or at the very least might be too much information for some folks, but I think you'll figure what I'm talking about here, and will be accepting of it. I'm not crude, but I am truthful...
NEW DREAM LOG - ENTRY 1
From the alexwallmusic.com file: Dream Log 2 © 2008
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