When you see a science fiction movie, you’re likely amazed at the technology. Whether this world features the ability to easily fly into space, holographic communications, incredible computer memory capacity, or robots that act just like their human counterparts, this genre has been inspiring future (and current) engineers and inventors for as long as its existed. Sometimes it’s tough to grasp just how amazing these changes are, since innovations are generally introduced one-by-one and incrementally. We just sort of adjust.
2 Kb of memory in the early 1950s. Project Whilwind by Daderot via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain.
Consider memory density, specifically the micro SD card. Measuring in at 15mm x 11mm x 1mm they’re described by Wikipedia as being “about the size of a fingernail.” Yet, a quick search reveals that high capacity cards can hold 400 Gigabytes, or 400,000,000,000,000 1s and 0s in a card that can be hard to find if dropped.
That’s a far cry from 2Kb of memory seen here in the 1950s. Even the amount of memory on a CD—around 700MB—is relatively tiny in today’s terms even though it was amazing when these disks started appearing in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Weirdly, one problem with memory now being so small is that these drives can be placed in areas that are difficult to access. Usually this means some sort of USB adapter (another amazing improvement over serial or parallel ports), but if you just want an actual SD extension cable in the form of a micro SD card, here it is! This device was conceived of when programming a BeagleBone Black, and could have lots of other applications.
For that matter, if you need to breakout either an SD card or card reader, all you’d need to do is clip and strip a few wires!
