Yesterday I saw an interesting sight when I walked past the patio of a restaurant near my building. A woman had plugged in an old computer about the size of a small electric typewriter into an exterior electrical outlet and was cranking away on it, apparently getting something done with a stack of 3 1/2-inch floppy disks at her side.

The scene was kind of funny, given the fact that laptop computers with high-capacity batteries and hard drives, complete with WiFi capability, are affordable and available to most everyone.

I used to have designs on being able to make my own “tower of power,” but not the actual construction of a desktop computer. I instead wanted to be able to connect my laptop to a tower including a hard drive, a CD drive, and an optical drive, all in the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) format.

Building that tower, over the course of a few years, were like building the Tower of Babel while Sisyphus was rolling a ball up its parking garage ramp. Yep, it was that frustrating. When technologies such as FireWire and the Universal System Bus (USB) came out, it was all over for SCSI.

Now, early last week, I saw something in an off-price computer store that made me shake my head. The item in question was a 16-gigabyte USB drive about the size of your thumb (which is why I call it a “thumb drive”), selling for about 100 bucks.

Not so long ago, purchasing 16 gigabytes worth of computer storage was a hefty, if not impossible, enterprise. Look at this chart to see how, over time, prices have gone down as capacity has gone up.

Look at the 1999.09 entry which shows a 16 GB hard drive for $379.98. Now, consider that $100 gives you the same storage space in a 60-gram device instead of a metal and plastic contraption the size of a brick.

Amazing, huh?