Back in 1995, when I was running my first business, the idea of a terabyte was practically science fiction. At the time, the fastest dial-up you could hope for was about 28.8 kilobits per second. At that speed, downloading 1 terabyte would have taken more than 30 years - so if I had started back then, I'd finally be finishing the download right about now.
Storage wasn't much better. In 1995, the largest hard drives you could buy were about 1 gigabyte, and they weren't cheap. A 1 GB drive could cost $1,000 or more back then - that's over $2,300 in today's money. So to store a single terabyte, you'd need over 2,000 drives, costing you well over two million dollars. Today, you can grab a 1 TB drive for under 50 bucks at Walmart.
Fast-forward to now: at my house, with modern internet speeds, I could download a terabyte between breakfast and lunch. What once took decades now takes hours. The moral of the story? Sometimes it pays to wait. Technology catches up. Procrastination wins. :)
And of course, since this is me, let's compare it to Star Trek. When The Next Generation aired in 1987, you'd hear techno-babble about computers running at "a few teraflops" or storage measured in "quads." At the time, those numbers sounded impossibly advanced. Today, your gaming PC or even your phone can rival what Starfleet thought was futuristic. Imagine explaining to Data that in 2025, a teenager could download a few GB of YouTube videos in less time than it takes to finish a poker hand in the holodeck.
I agree procrastination wins in this instance. However, as a general operating procedure, procrastination is terrible. I know, I put myself through it for years. I needed that fear of a due date to get to work on my assignments. So many tears and all-nighters.
Fortunately, that changed once I got a real job, which actually allowed me some breathing space to get things done right. I'll always remember when I was a resident, my attending told me "You think you're busy now, wait 'til you're an attending." But I found out he was wrong. As a resident, I was busy doing what *other* people wanted me to do. As an attending, I was busy doing what *I chose* to do. All the difference in the world.
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