Tech Talk with Toni

This past weekend, my mom found herself in a modern-day crisis: her emails were bouncing! No new messages were coming in, and the culprit was a little notification reading, “Storage Full.” Her immediate, reflexive solution? She wanted to go to the store to buy another flash drive. I had to gently talk her off the ledge. I explained that she couldn't just plug a USB drive in and solve all her problems. Hoarding physical drives in desk drawers is a relic of how we used to think about data. But as we sat there clearing out gigabytes of old forwarded videos and blurry photos, it got me thinking... My mom’s instinct to hold a physical object to store her digital life makes perfect sense when you look at how we got here.  The human race has spent over a century trying to figure out where to put our memories. Here is the story of how our data evolved from heavy, physical objects you could hold in your hand, to invisible streams in the cloud.  To put the timeline in perspective, thi...