What happens when mass storage leaves microchips in the dust.
Those of us with one foot far enough in the grave to have been using computers in the mid-1980s remember our extraordinary liberation from the floppy disk. We were freed from the requirement that all our programs and operating systems and files come in 360-kilobyte, 5½-inch chunks. It was a marvelous advance, the revolution in hard disk technology that gave us 10-megabyte mass storage devices for $1,000.
But it is the advances since then - and those we can firmly see our future promising - that are even more marvelous. Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. Happy me!
We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price - more than a dozen times the force of Moore's law, with less than one-hundredth the press excitement.
My entire music library - 1,803 tracks, 128.8 hours of relatively high-quality MP3 files - now sits in what seems like a small 8-gigabyte corner of my hard disk. San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor carries the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica on his laptop - the thing that fills 6½ linear feet on my family room bookshelf takes up 4 percent of his disk space. Today, a $350 investment in mass storage can buy enough space to hold approximately 250 hours - one and a half 24-hour-a-day weeks - of moderate-quality digital video. And tomorrow? I'm willing to guess that by 2012 the $100 mass storage option for PCs should hold a full terabyte.
Computing power and connectivity hogged the headlines in the past decade, but mass storage will take the lead for three reasons. The first is regulatory: It does not look as though we in the United States will get the capital and regulatory structures of telecommunications right fast enough to see the bandwidth explosion that we know is technically possible during the next several years. The second is that keeping up with Moore's law in silicon is becoming more and more expensive. Intel, IBM, et al. are designing the next generations of microprocessors right now. But the cost of a semiconductor fab is now $3 billion and rising - few companies can afford one. The third is that mass storage is very simple: You write marks, you read marks, whether on modern magneto-optical or Babylonian clay-tablet media. What matters is the size and precision of your chisel, and our engineers' technical creativity makes it a favorable bet that the next five or ten years will see connectivity and Moore's law lagging behind the explosion of mass storage.
So, what will the world look like if mass storage is not a limiting factor?
First, the cheaper the disk space, the more dead the traditional business models of the entertainment industry. Money will come from new content for which a premium price based on must-haveness can still be justified, much like the hardcover-softcover distinction in bookselling. Substantial money will also come from special big-screen, live, and other experiences that cannot be duplicated at home. It's not that information - in the multimedia content sense - wants to be free. Deep in people's minds is a powerful human drive to exchange, to reciprocate, to not just take but also give. But reciprocity works only if the terms of the exchange are seen as fair.
Second, the overwhelming cheapness of storage will lead to the apotheosis of librarianship - or, rather, of search. Overwhelmingly cheap storage means that we will save copies of everything. But saved copies of everything are useful only when you can find what you are looking for. I already find it much, much easier to locate things on the publicly accessible part of my hard disk that is www.j-bradford-delong.net than in my private directories. Why? Google. Other people have omnivorously plowed through the directories opened up to the world, and Google has aggregated the Web traces they have made. Intelligence - artificial or otherwise - at assessing the value of documents and their relevance to you may well become the truly scarce factor. And one of the basic principles of economics is that the truly scarce factor is highly rewarded. Google's children will be a big part of the picture. Tomorrow's movie studio profits may well accrue to the studio that can write the best algorithms to download copies of the 50 films you'd most enjoy to your hard disk overnight.
Finally, and most important, your memory will improve. There will be space to store whatever you wish to recall from your day - pictures of people you saw (grabbed from the Internet), words you heard (recorded via laptop microphone and then translated into text), not to mention whatever thoughts you found time to write down. Your life is your archive, and your archive is your life. Forgetting will be much more difficult - unless, of course, you want to. Then you can always edit it.
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