Remember School House Rock? Schoolhouse Rock was essentially three-minute cartoons, which aired on ABC-TV from 1973 to 1985, and were designed as a catchy way to teach children the fundamentals of government, as well as math, grammar and science. Do you remember the "I'm Just a Bill" they would play to help educate kids on how a bill becomes a law? Ok, does this picture refresh your memory?

How bout this video? It's 2.2MB (compressed from >7MB), so it should be playable after a few moments. By the time you read this sentence, the Flash movie should have started playing, so scroll down and watch the Flash movie, then come back here. I'll be waiting...


Click 'Play' button above and wait a bit for it to download. If video doesn't play, you can play the audio of School House Rock's "I'm Just a Bill" here:


Click 'Play' button above and it should play "I'm Just a Bill" pretty quickly since a small .WAV file. Well, anyway, just last night I came across an interesting news post on Engadget about a new hard drive technology that piqued my interest and enticed me to check out the Flash movie.

Here's what I read on Engadget: (bolded part is what caught my eye)

First Hitachi, then Seagate and Toshiba, now it looks like Fujitsu’s hopped on the perpendicular drive recording bandwagon (dude, that flash movie is obviously having a seriously profound effect on the tech industry), announcing plans for a 200GB 2.5-inch drive by early 2007. Funny, we assumed we’d be seeing 200GB 2.5-inch drives any day now anyhow, can’t you at least try and totally blow us away with some vaporware hyperbole, guys?

[Via The Inq] (Ryan Block) Read more from this post.

So at 11pm last night I decide to check out the Flash movie. The Hitaschi Perpendicular Flash movie explains perpendicular hard drive technology - a new way of "squeezing" more bits onto a hard drive by changing the orientation of the way the bits are recorded. Normally magnetic bits are written parallel to the drive's surface, but not with perpendicularity - its 90 degrees perpendicular to the normal parallel orientation. Because the bits are recorded upright and "into" the surface of the drive platter, you can squeeze a lot more bits together without the bits polarity causing the bits to flip their magnetic orientation. Have I lost you yet?

Well, no problem. This hilarious Flash movie will explain everything in layman's terms just as the School House Rock "I'm Just a Bill" TV clip used to teach children. In fact, there is a striking similarity between the two characters, the voices, and the animation style. When I saw this Flash movie, I immediately thought of the School House Rock "I'm Just a Bill" clip. I've included both the video clips for your own comparison. Let me know if you agree they are very similar and if you laughed as hard as I did.

What's great about this perpendicular technology is we can eventually have 200GB hard drives that are only 2.5" - small enough for the 5th generation iPod! Yes, the perpendicularity is looking good. I must commend and thank Hitachi for educating me about the wonders of perpendicularness. If only all education was this much fun!
(P.S. Calling all Geeks! Check out the cool Perpendicular T-Shirt)

(To view the animation you will need the Macromedia Flash plug in.)