We have a revolution going on. It is a silent one and a technological one. The revolution is changing the face of everything electronic and may soon spread out into other fields. The revolution that I am talking about is miniaturization. We are getting so used to electronics getting smaller that we hardly notice the changes anymore, but when you look back a few years at some of this stuff and look at where we are now, you realize that we have made some incredible strides in making things smaller. There is more to the story however. Things are not only getting smaller, but they are getting more efficient and cheaper. Capacity is one of the things that has seen a huge improvement. In the old days of computing, about 20 years ago, hard drives were never big enough. Even the average at home computer enthusiast had more stuff than his hard drive could hold, if he was lucky enough to even have a hard drive. Today, the average computer owner has more than enough space available, even if he or she keeps a lot of junk on the drive.

For years we all looked forward to bigger hard drives and when we got them, they were soon filled up. This is not the case anymore for most of us, who have drives bigger than 1 ½ terabytes available to us. It is easy to throw terms like terabyte around, but how much is that really? We could say that a terabyte is one thousand gigabytes, but that might not help much. Look at it this way, if you had 500,000 type written pages it would take one gigabyte to hold it, so a terabyte is 500,000 pages X 1000 or 500,000,000 type written pages. In other terms, the entire print collection of the Library of Congress can be held on 20 of these drives, since it is about 20 terabytes of information. Soon, it may fit on one drive, if we keep going the way we are. Do you like movies? If the answer is yes, you could store 300 feature length movies on your one terabyte drive. I want you to know that there are even bigger drives already available and they are relatively cheap.

As physical devices get smaller, they use less energy and usually become faster because components are closer together. Look at the CPU in your computer. The CPU is the Central Processing Unit of your computer, the brain. They are getting so small that soon you might need a microscope to see them. Right now a new 32 nanometer process is coming into favor. We we are talking about nanometers. What is the size range that we are really talking about? As incredible as it sounds, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A 32 nanometer computer chip is 32 billionths of a meter. When you look at a CPU chip, you are not only seeing the chip, but the housing around it, that makes it seem much bigger. We are talking about a chip that contains almost 2 billion transistors that were carved into using a 32 nanometer process. It boggles the mind to think in these types of numbers. As I said, when something electrical gets smaller it requires less energy to operate. With less energy comes less heat. Heat has been one of the big problems over the years for computers and has required elaborate cooling systems that are composed of large and small fans and sometimes even liquid. As the chips get smaller the cooling becomes easier and there is even at least one chip on the market that cools naturally. It is not as powerful as most other chips, but it gets the job done. It is the Atom chip.

One has only to look at the cell phone to realize what is going on. When the cell phone first came out, it was a brick like device that didn't work very well, cost a bundle to buy and was only a phone. It began to shrink over the years and service improved as more and more cell phone towers were put up. As the phone got smaller, it began to get power to spare and some games and small utilities were put onto it. PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants were also becoming popular thanks to companies like Palm. They were able to handle more complex games and more complex utilities. A person could now carry a simplified word processor with them. The PDAs became more and more capable as chips improved and reached their peak a couple of years ago and then began to fade from view. This was caused by phones. The cell phone had new chips, more capable chips that allowed it to take on the abilities of not only a phone, but of a PDA. The cell phone had turned into a PDA with a phone in it. You could even watch movies on it and add flash memory to it to increase its storage capacity.

People are in love with music and this fact alone has made a tiny device called, you guessed it, the IPod very popular. With the introduction of this device, people could save and play their favorite music on a small device that didn't take up much room. Even this device began to shrink and became more useful. Its storage capacity has increased and it can now show movies. It has become very popular and there are many imitators and some of the imitators are even more capable than the IPod. The IPod was launched in 2001 and now includes even touch screen models. Tiny hard drives are at the heart of some IPods, while the rest use flash memory. As I said there are now many IPod look alikes out there and some of them are just as capable, if not more. We have truly become a portable music and movie generation. This is one of the things that is really angering the movie industry. They don't want us to copy movies, so copying them and putting them on our devices really twists their guts, even if we own the movie in the first place.

Even more mechanical devices like printers have gotten much smaller. It is not uncommon to see a tiny photo printer attached to a lap top these days. This would have been considered impossible a few years ago. Scanners have also come a long way. Now you can get one with the minimal size of just a couple of inches deep and a little more wide than a piece of paper. Huge copy machines have shrunk so small that many of us have them in our homes. Not only that, but they are also printers and fax machines. These all in one machines have revolutionized the capabilities of the average person. They now have a full fledged office in their home.

I believe that the biggest problem left for computing is the operating system. Most of us are tied into Windows, which has been letting us down for years. While all our devices have improved, the Windows operating system has been one of those things that has become one of the most expensive parts of our computer and it still has many flaws, annoying ones I might add. While everything was getting cheaper and faster, Windows got slower and more expensive. Vista is slower than Windows XP. Windows needs real competition, or it will continue to be the bottleneck of our systems. By the way look for a huge boost in memory capacity coming to your computer soon. Scientists have figured out how to increase storage to a whopping 4 Petabits per square inch. A Petabit equals one quadrillion bits of information or 1000 Terabits.