The Final Encyclopedia
04/13/2010 21:10
I’m doing a lot of my work at school now that it’s getting warmer and the windows are going to be open. The tramp is up in the back yard and the kids are running around having a great time. It’s a lot of fun, but not so conducive to working. So I’m working down at school.
I got a portable hard drive to back up my work onto, and carry it back and forth. It’s a USB drive in an attractive plastic case. Pocket size. 1 terabyte.
I started thinking about that while I was driving the other day. When I started working in the computer business, the biggest drive you could get was an Imprimis Wren VI. It was a 5 1/4 inch full-height drive, which meant it was 3 1/4 inches tall, and close to 8 inches deep. More or less the size and weight of two bricks.
Its capacity was 677MB. Unformatted. OEM cost was just over $2,000.
I know. That makes me seem incredibly old. But it was only 20 years ago. (The big one in the picture is a 5 1/4 full height Maxtor -- it's a little newer than the Wren I'm talking about, but not much. The other one is a 2 1/2 inch 6 gig drive, which was the state of the art about 4 or 5 years ago. You can get that kind of storage now without moving parts)
So anyway, a little quick math. Three of these Wren drives would have cost about $6,000 and given you about 2 gigabytes of storage, in about a foot of vertical space (allowing a little bit for air-flow -- probably not enough!). Five hundred of these foot-high units would add up to a terabyte (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes =1,000,000 megabytes). A terabyte of 1989 data would be five hundred feet high! Or, it would have been 100 five-foot high stacks. It would have filled your house. And heated your house.
But presumably it would have been a nice house, if the heating system cost you $3,000,000!
All this now fits in a package I can hold in my hand, and uses so little power it can run off the current that comes across the USB. Oh, and it costs $150.
Damn!
So, what about the value of the data. At first, you might think “well, that hasn’t changed in value.” Really? When you can carry the equivalent of a thousand copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica or a tenth of the entire Library of Congress print collection in your back pocket instead of your wallet?
I was thinking about this in the context of the little debate over Wikipedia I was just involved in on Inside Higher Ed. What struck me was, how spoiled we’ve (I’ve) become. Twenty years ago, Wiki would have been the holy grail, the Final Encyclopedia of Dickson’s Childe Cycle of sci-fi novels. Hypertext, collaborative...evolving. And here we are in 2010, complaining about it!
I stand corrected.
I started thinking about that while I was driving the other day. When I started working in the computer business, the biggest drive you could get was an Imprimis Wren VI. It was a 5 1/4 inch full-height drive, which meant it was 3 1/4 inches tall, and close to 8 inches deep. More or less the size and weight of two bricks.
Its capacity was 677MB. Unformatted. OEM cost was just over $2,000.
So anyway, a little quick math. Three of these Wren drives would have cost about $6,000 and given you about 2 gigabytes of storage, in about a foot of vertical space (allowing a little bit for air-flow -- probably not enough!). Five hundred of these foot-high units would add up to a terabyte (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes =1,000,000 megabytes). A terabyte of 1989 data would be five hundred feet high! Or, it would have been 100 five-foot high stacks. It would have filled your house. And heated your house.
But presumably it would have been a nice house, if the heating system cost you $3,000,000!
All this now fits in a package I can hold in my hand, and uses so little power it can run off the current that comes across the USB. Oh, and it costs $150.
Damn!
So, what about the value of the data. At first, you might think “well, that hasn’t changed in value.” Really? When you can carry the equivalent of a thousand copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica or a tenth of the entire Library of Congress print collection in your back pocket instead of your wallet?
I was thinking about this in the context of the little debate over Wikipedia I was just involved in on Inside Higher Ed. What struck me was, how spoiled we’ve (I’ve) become. Twenty years ago, Wiki would have been the holy grail, the Final Encyclopedia of Dickson’s Childe Cycle of sci-fi novels. Hypertext, collaborative...evolving. And here we are in 2010, complaining about it!
I stand corrected.
