I was just thinking of what people would store stuff on in the future. Would we still be using what would recognizably be optical discs? Back in the fifties they figured we'd be using magnetic tape forever, and now that seems like dark ages.
A common variation that shows up a lot is a crystallic cube. Does this have any practicality? It seems like a step backwards as it's sort of like a disc only more cumbersome. But I suppose if such a structure is somehow better for storing 500 Terrabytes of data.
Or perhaps we store up to five hundred movies on an ipod-like device and simply play it on big screen tvs. What are some of your ideas?
Actually, the densest and most cost-effective medium is still the mechanically spinning, magnetically-encoded hard disk (I recall some iPod models have or had these), whose storage capacity has continued to grow exponentially. I read about PMRL in EE Times over ten years ago, and I thought that was was a "bit" freaky (if you write bits too close together on a magnetic medium, you can't read each individual bit back as a pulse, but each combination of 1's and 0's makes a unique waveshape in the read head...), and there are so many other techniques that have contributed to higher density drives... we now have terrabyte drives for $100. That's 50,000 times the size of the first disk drive I bought, and THAT one could store dozens of novels.
But why a big screen TV when you can have eyeglasses that project the big-screen image into your eyes? It's just another little wire coming out of your iPod, along with the two for the
earphones earbuds.
I recently got a "Traveller" brand video camera at Aldi, on sale for $80. It's a little smaller than a pack of cigarettes. In some ways it's a piece of crap, it's got two fixed focus points - infinity, and a "macro" switch changes the focus to about 10 inches. Anywhere else and you're screwed. I've had a heck of a time getting good, in-focus still pics of close-up things out of it. I just keep moving it in and out and hit the "shiutter" button. The display shows SD memory card space in still pics available as I do this, usually 870 or so. It's good it'll store so many on a 2 gb SD card (it's about the size of a key head), as I need to take so many to get one that's in focus. I can turn it off, pull the memory card out and stick it in my computer's front panel to copy the pics to my hard disk.
The 2 gigabytes on the chip is only two-dimensional - the circuitry is surely less than a thousanth of an inch thick on top of a slice of silicon. If it could be made in three dimensions, it would be an inch thick, and hold several terrabytes. Not sure if that would be useful on this camera, 2 gig is already enough for 800 pics or 2 hours of video. Well, it DOES have a display and headphones, so you could then have a few hundred movies on it, in case you found yourself stuck on a desert island.
They are fully as reliable and long-lasting as magnetic disc media. Probably more so, and it's much easier to make multiple redundant copies.
I foresee a time, not far down the road, when solid-state memory devices will be powerful enough to contain entire computer operating systems, and we can travel anywhere and plug them into cheap slave terminal-keyboard-monitor arrangements as needed, and do our work, unplug the things, and walk away with the whole enchilada in a pocket. Hotel rooms, coffee-shops, etc., will simply be expected to have the relevant slave hardware available.
caw
How about we need to store nothing. Personally that is.
For instance, even now, I don't always have a disc when I want to watch a movie. I can turn on Netflicks or some other Web site and just watch what I want.
First I needed to own a set of encyclopedias. Then I needed to own the discs. Now I can subscribe online, or even use free sites like Wikipedia.
So, perhaps in the future, I don't need to own any data. I just need to own the device to access the data, and can access it anywhere, any time.
What's the online Google thing, the word processor, where your files are stored online? Google Docs or something. Like Gmail (and yahoo and hotmail), but the program and your documents are online, and you only need an online computer to get and operate on them.
But yes, a lot of people ARE uncomfortable with that, not having a copy onhand of their files, and having to go to "The Man" to get to their files.
