It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1 TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000 GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.

This article looks back at how hard disk drives have evolved since they first burst onto the scene in 1956. We’ll examine the radical changes over time for three different aspects of HDDs: Size, storage space, and price.

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The World Wide Web has promised a lot over the years. Thus far, some of those promises have been fulfilled, but there have also been disappointments. One area that I feel has been consistently disappointing in recent years is the promise of newer, more powerful, and more useful file formats. I’ll take a look at three of these: SVG, JPEG 2000, and MNG, below.

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We often think of computers as a very modern phenomenon, but there were actually plenty of computers around 50 years ago. They just weren’t an everyman commodity, instead limited to goverment and corporate use. And they certainly weren’t small. Some of them had imaginative names like Whirlwind, Colossus and Pegasus, while others were slightly less poetic with names like Z4, AN/FSQ-7 and ENIAC.

Below we have listed as many as 19 examples of computers from the early days, pioneering efforts that although cutting edge in their day now look lovingly retro.

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For webmasters and web designers, the question of where to find high quality images and other media to use on your sites can be complicated. It can be expensive to purchase photos, even if you stick to stock photography. If you run a blog or another site that requires lots of photos, you can go broke just by purchasing images. But there is a way that you can legally use photos, music and even text for free: Creative Commons.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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We know there are a lot of people out there who love Firefox (including us here at Pingdom), so here is a whole bunch of really nice Firefox-themed wallpapers that you can adorn your desktop with.

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JPG, PNG and GIF are the three image formats that websites use for their images. We decided to find out exactly how common each format is, and how large the images of each format tend to be. After analyzing more than 23 million images, we have found some very interesting results.

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Aside from uptime, website performance is something we talk a lot about here at Pingdom. There are lots of ways to improve the speed of your website, but this post will focus on ways to optimize the size and number of files your website uses, both being important factors affecting the load time.

The files we are talking about are of course the files that are delivered to a visitor when they load your website, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and most important in this case, images.

Since images usually make up most of the size of a website, we will focus the majority of this article on image optimization.

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