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When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.

It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.

So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data's worth of storage space. But you're talking decades, not centuries.

Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.

This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.

Older X'er here - I keep telling my wife - for all the shit we've had to live through, we damn sure better get first contact with ET in our lifetimes too!

It hasn't been that hard in my experience. Ignore shifts in the social landscape until the yung'ins reach a consensus about it, and always remember that time just before the dotcom crash when a company got venture funding to deliver tuna subs by mail.

Okay, as someone born in 1988, I am not an elder (but also I will accept you being kind to me please, thank you 🫠)

I’m old enough to remember going to Hollywood video or blockbuster with my grandma on Fridays. Have a movie night. Those were some amazing memories.

I remember being happy to watch whatever came on one of the four channels that your TV could pick up with a rabbit ear antenna.

8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn't know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.

6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that'd run on the computers

The elders had to rewind the movies after watching

If only the pace of technology was the only paradigm shift to have to worry about since the 80s/90s

OK, this one kind of hurt a bit. I can't be the only one with a functioning VCR in the room with them right now...

Personally I love being part of the evolution of computers. I was born at a time where I could be part of "moderne" or rather "not too nerdy" phase of computers, and to see the whole evolution of electronics and so on. I don't envy the younger generations that kind of skipped to the "end part" (computers being "easy"). I know that a lot of things will still be developed and we are only seeing the first of AI stuff now and VR is also still a minor thing but could evolve into a much bigger thing. Electrification of cars is in full swing. Robots do more and more things by theselves (lawnmowers, vacuums, cars) because the "brain power" in the devices are pushed all the time, enabling more advanced sensors to be taken more advantage of.

Is so crazy to explain people I played games in an spectrum in 1987 back when many didn't knew what a "computer" was in my country cause like less than 10% of the people in my country. And now you put a helmet and you're inside the game!