A 32GB flash drive arrived last week in the mail.  The cost of the flash drive was only $20.  With this in mind (and with apologies to Charles Dickens) allow me to present, "Ghosts of Memory Past, Present and Future."

Memory Past.  Around 1972, just one megabyte of RAM for the IBM 360 mainframe retailed for $100,000.  The hardware was about the size of a small refrigerator.

Memory Present.  It should not come as a surprise to anyone that today a one terabyte (TB) hard drive has a street price of less than $100.

Memory Future.  Holographic Data Storage (HDS) holds the possibility of storing many terabytes of data in a sugar-cube-sized crystal.  This would be sufficient to store video of a person's entire life.  Whether one would actually want that is, of course, another matter.

If you would like to share memories of technology past or thoughts on how innovations can be used in the future, please begin by posting a comment below.