Experts visiting Carnegie Mellon University last week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of computing at Carnegie Mellon shared what might come out of their labs in the next five to 10 years.

Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, said it’s now possible to buy a terabyte of computer memory for about $700.

Dan R. Olsen Jr., a computer science professor at Brigham Young University, said he could now store every academic paper he’s ever written, every set of software code he’s written, all his e-mail, and family genealogy information and photos, and it takes up barely one third of the memory space on a simple iPod.