The p-Code Machine

This must have happened in thousands of series/movies, where some bloke makes an outrageously sounding claim about future possibilities. I happened to notice one the other day… Some guy picking up a CD (from the time where CDs were relatively new), and he says: “In the future we’ll be able to storage a hundred of these CDs on a single microchip”.

The silly thing is… actually we already sortof can… affordably… Since encoding 100 CDs x 70 minutes per disc x 60 seconds x 256kbit/sec VBR MP3 x 8 (bit) / 1024 (kilobyte) / 1024 (megabyte) ~ 13GB of data…

And if we play fast and loose with the microchip term… Oh wait… The future is now… It’s called a 16GB SecureDigital memory card, which can be bought at any electronics shop, for about 40EUR… Doh!