Boggled

So… in making the rounds today I went off to Photobucket to view the full size version of one of Abe’s fabulous photos and was startled to see Photobucket has over five and a half billion images hosted on its site. That’s billion! Think of the storage required to host that many photos, and Photobucket’s service is free… which boggles MY mind, if no one else’s. If one can believe the counter in the lower left of the screen, people are uploading over 1,000 photos per minute to Photobucket.

Simply amazing. One wonders how much disc space Google, Flickr, and other video/photo hosting sites use, eh? And how long can this sort of thing continue, free of charge? Dang, but these here inter-tubes are amazing, eh?

The pic is of a 1987-vintage IBM direct-access storage device (DASD), which could store 1.26 billion characters, and it was considered to be cost-effective at the time. I've been in data centers where there were literally row upon row upon row of these devices in a room that rivaled a football field in size. One wonders what disc farms look like these days.