The Scrivener: Coffee With A Terabyte
…A young (that is, less than half my age) woman was sitting at a table with her cup of coffee. I stopped in my tracks. It wasn't a cup. It was one of those foamed polystyrene or cardboard things used by take-aways and some coffee bars. The young woman had a nice face so I asked her, 'Don't they have proper cups and saucers?' And that was the start of a long and fascinating conversation in which we unearthed a few pleasant coincidences….
Reading a Brian Barratt column makes you long to sit and chat with him for a deliciously long hour while sipping good coffee.
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Time flies. Oh yes it does. It's about 50 years since I discovered the delightful aroma and taste of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. That was in a coffee shop and restaurant in a centuries-old building in Lincoln (in England). And it's about 30 years since I first used an IBM desk-top personal computer. That was on my desk in the office here in Melbourne (Australia).
Nowadays, I can't afford to buy real Blue Mountain so have to be satisfied with substitutes or more than satisifed with Lavazza Torino. With computers, however, it's a different story. For a start, you get an awful lot more for your money than you did 30 years ago.
The IBM PC had two drives for 5.25 inch floppy disks. Each disk could hold 360 kb (kilobytes) of data.
Now I'm sitting at a computer with a relatively small hard disk that holds about 68 gigabytes of data. Gigabytes? A gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes. A megabyte is about 1,000 kilobytes. So my hard disk holds about 3 million times more information than one of those old floppy disks.
The other day, I went to a large office supply company and bought an external hard disk drive with a capacity of 1 terabyte. That's about 1,000 gigabytes. At this stage, my weak ability to work with numbers and extended multiplication sums has... died. But at least I can assure you that a terabyte is not an earth-crawling dinosaur with very nasty teeth.
After talking with an articulate and knowledgeable young assistant, who clearly answered all the questions of this mathematical ignoramus, I went to the check-out, paid for my new acquisition, and thence to the coffee shop in the same barn-like building.
A young (that is, less than half my age) woman was sitting at a table with her cup of coffee. I stopped in my tracks. It wasn't a cup. It was one of those foamed polystyrene or cardboard things used by take-aways and some coffee bars. The young woman had a nice face so I asked her, 'Don't they have proper cups and saucers?' And that was the start of a long and fascinating conversation in which we unearthed a few pleasant coincidences.
She had lived for several years in Torino (Turin). Yes, that's the home of Lavazza coffee. In Italy, she assured me, real coffee is drunk from real cups. When she returned to Australia, she had difficulty getting accustomed to these cups made of cardboard or non-biodegradable foamed polystyrene. She also had difficulty finding places that serve real coffee as they do in Italy. So I told her about my local coffee shop which is run by three generations of a family of Italians who understand coffee.
We chatted about the ways people speak, and about dialects and accents — Australian, British and Italian English. She recognised my English accent, although I left England nearly 60 years ago. She had lived for a couple of years in England. I was born in Nottinghamshire. She had studied at Nottingham University. So we swapped reminiscences of Nottingham and the legend of Robin Hood. At Primary School, I generally had the role of Friar Tuck in school plays, by the way.
Time flies. We had to part company. Home I came, happily clutching my Western Digital 1 terabyte external disk drive. I switched on my little (and cheap) espresso coffee making gadget and relished a couple of small cups of Lavazza Torino, Il Perfetto Espresso, strong, black, superb. In a proper cup.
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2011
