Stephen was the only student in residence at Aberystwyth to be following the British Museums ancient history unit and so the module he had selected had been transferred overnight via SuperJANET and now resided on his local disc. The unit only occupied 2 gigabytes and so fitted easily on his 5 gigabyte disc. Machine configurations had changed beyond all proportions over the last 8 years. The thought of local disc sizes being measured in 10s of megabytes now seemed frankly hilarious! A five gigabyte disc only cost two hundred pounds now and as inflation, even at 2 percent per annum had reduced the real value of money, most computer components had dropped to `pocket money' prices. The technology had changed of course. It was just a semiconductor `disc' with no moving parts. The parallel access circuits had also meant that data could be recovered at quite amazing rates. The `main memory' of his machine was also large. Most machines had at least two hundred megabytes and in fact Stephen's had five hundred. The screen resolution had improved too. The screen measured about 3200 dots by 1800 fitting the new 16 x 9 ratio. This had thus about 10 times the dots of the best screens on the early 90's. Colour was better too with each dot independently being able to display any one of 65536 alternatives.
Like most remote learning material, the unit was a hypermedia module with text, fixed graphics, moving video and sound. The module covered the Acropolis of Athens. Students tended to follow the recommended track through material like this but sometimes pursued the details of particular areas that interested them. This was the first module on ancient Greece that Stephen had viewed so he spent the next couple of hours mainly looking around the site. The video was a mixture of real footage and simulated material. It was possible to reconstruct the damaged sections and see how the temples must have looked all those years ago. It was in fact easier for a student to view the nooks and crannies on the hypermedia lesson that it would have been on an actual site visit. Much of the mount area was now fenced off to prevent even more damage from trampling feet.