Normal hard drives are built like record player: you have spinning platters and an "arm" that reads and writes the data to the "records".

Computer drives only based on memory chips are nothing new - but bloody expensive. But sooner or later they will replace normal drives, since they are much faster, less less energy, have no moving parts and much more durable. Best of all: no more humming noise.

Especially for notebooks Sold State Drives are a blessing: batteries will last much longer and they will produce less heat.

At the moment these drives are EXPENSIVE. A 64 Gbyte SSD is usually around €700 to €1.000. But like all computer gizmos the prizes will come down.

Samsung has recently announced a 256 Gbyte SSD with a killer performance. The Nerds are drooling like mad - and so am I.

Back in the early days of desktop publishing these SyQuest cartridges were the best thing to send your data to clients or the printers. And they worked pretty well … most of the time (any one remember all the hassle to mount SyQuests when there was the wrong or a nasty SCSI driver on it?).

44 MBytes sound like a joke today and they were bloody expensive too. You can easily upload that amount of data today or burn a cheap CD. But all these technologies were not yet available at that time.

Digital Life certainly has improved.