Sometimes I like to think about an exchange I had with my uncle Kenny many years ago. A draftsman and engineer, he fell in love with the Commodore Amiga 128. The computer, had twice the RAM of the Commodore 64k, a whopping 128K. And he had just added on a new accessory, a 16MB external hard drive.

“This is all the memory you’ll ever need,” he told me proudly while sucking on his cherry-tobacco-stuffed pipe. “Do you know how much memory sixteen megabytes is? You could write a dozen novels and never fill it up.”

Over the years, of course, his wisdom has proven to have some holes in it. Since that conversation, Commodore has died out, Apple came and went and came back again, and MS-DOS has given way to various iterations of Windows. Megabytes have given way to gigabytes and terabytes and beyond and my standard portable memory cards are no longer 3.5-inch floppies with 1.4MB per disc, but a handy flash drive that holds 2 GB of information. (I own two of them.)

Of course, there are still plenty of people willing to sell the next “big thing” in memory storage. The latest is a sexy one terabyte hard drive I’m considering for my current PC. And of course, the sales pitch mirrors my uncle’s words from long ago: “It’s all the memory you’ll ever need.”

Of course, as a writer, I value memories like this far more than all the flash drives in the average Best Buy.