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How Science Fiction Imagines Data Storage (hpe.com)
Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185) shared this story from Hewlett Packard's Enterprise blog:
Storage is a staple of both science and science fiction, and forms the basis, or a crucial component, of many a piece of speculative fiction... [H]ere are eight past visions of the storage future that either passed their error checks or succumbed to bit rot.
Why store vast quantities of data on a device when you can just slap it into someone's head?
The article acknowledges that in many science fiction stories, data is simply preserved using such primitive technologies as "the written word" and "brute-force [human] memory," as well as ordinary real-world storage technologies like the server room in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, or basic non-cloud-based computers. But there's also wetware -- think "Johnny Mnemonic "-- and the data crystals in Babylon Five.
The article even acknowledges that time Batman beat Mr. Freeze by carving binary code into a wall, giving future generations the recipe for antifreeze.
Why store vast quantities of data on a device when you can just slap it into someone's head?
The article acknowledges that in many science fiction stories, data is simply preserved using such primitive technologies as "the written word" and "brute-force [human] memory," as well as ordinary real-world storage technologies like the server room in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, or basic non-cloud-based computers. But there's also wetware -- think "Johnny Mnemonic "-- and the data crystals in Babylon Five.
The article even acknowledges that time Batman beat Mr. Freeze by carving binary code into a wall, giving future generations the recipe for antifreeze.
One of the funniest things I saw was in Rollerball, where one of the protagonist was shown the computer who "knows" everything, storing it in bubble memory, implemented as a huge aquarium with bubbles rising up from the bottom
- Writing data to DNA sequences (ST:TNG "The Chase")
- Rotating storage (large ceramic rotating cylinders read/write with lasers. In a Alastair Reynolds novel (cannot remember which one).
- Same principle as delay lines, but using mirrors on remote planets. It does have to be repeated/refreshed but so does plain RAM. What is the capacity of an infrared laser across 2 light-days?
I always laughed at Babylon 5's data crystals: What good is something you can't label? Even an SD card is tough, MicroSD out of the question (you generally just install and forget about them anyway, until it's time to upgrade). But is that my engineering reports to give to Captain Sheridan, or my collection of Centauri porn with full attributes?
Design for Use, not Construction!
The article reads like an advertisement for cloud storage. It is the sort of garbage a CIO who is better at golf than engineering or technology would spout.
The cloud is great for some things, but without physical access control there is zero way you can be confident someone isn't copying every piece of your data this very second. Sure you can encrypt it, but you should only put data in the cloud that you are OK with being decrypted. Just because the encryption looks very strong now doesn't mean it won't be considered stupidly weak in a decade or two.
Cloud cloud cloud.
Does the author not realize that when you have latency measured in minutes, hours, days and years, the cloud might not be a very good choice for storage?
...
No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room. “Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index,” said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered. “Containing all the relevant information,” added the Director. “Brought up to date every morning.” “And co-ordinated every afternoon.” “On the basis of which they make their calculations.”
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
Anderton (Cruise) is viewing a bunch of files, manipulating them with hand gestures. Then, he drags them to (probably) a disc icon, unplugs some sort of memory module, walks across the room and plugs the module into another machine.
His office LAN must be even worse than mine.
Have gnu, will travel.
The article mentions Gibson's character Johnny Mnemonic (which also used to be the BBS handle of Mike Godwin of the eponymous law). Just now I'm almost done with Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive © 1989, which has a huge memory and computing device (the Aleph in an external package. However, I think this novel was written long after Johnny Mnemonic appeared (because jm was using the handle in the mid-80s).
Mona Lisa Overdrive also talks a lot about the shape of cyberspace, which now maps to visualization of various aspects of the Internet. In epistemological terms, I think that "expertise" involves (1) an understanding the overall shape of the solution space, (2) specific knowledge of many data points that span significant portions of the solution space, and (3) skills in applying the expertise to solve new problems.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Yes it is fragile it also won't disappear. People will remember the good old days
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If greatness was that likely wouldn't there already be somebody great, and wouldn't they have visited us?
I don't mean like Trump. I mean spacefaring aliens.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It used "fluidics" IIRC, and was prone to misplace some data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... And in Gordon Dickson's Tactics of Mistake there was an aide to a major character who served by being able to recall data he'd memorized. Arguably no big deal but it is a SF novel that dealt with people with exceptional abilities. If we're going to mention mentats (who were more about interpreting data) then I guess we can mention this guy.
Speaking of fictional data storage, I want to know more about the crystal storage and the data blackout that happened years before the story being told in in Blade Runner 2049.
Kriston
Hate to break the news, but you aren't particularly special. Every generation from 10000 BC to today thinks that they are special, somehow on the brink of either disaster or transcendence, that their position is somehow unique in history.
Well, you aren't and we aren't. There is nothing particularly special about these times, any more than it was in Roman times, Greek times, the Renaissance, or any other time. The things you think are special crises are not special at all, the things that point to some elevation of the human condition are entirely in your mind.
The world and the human race have been bumbling along for about 4.8 billion years and 20,000 years respectively, they will still be bumbling around 10,000 years from now.
The eponymous Schlock is from a race of carbosilicate life forms descendant from data storage devices. Apparently the idea was that organic memory could repair itself and regenerate as necessary. That it could evolve into a self-aware life form was apparently a side-effect.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Andre Norton's space ships were like that, except they used wire spools instead of tape. (Which is an even older technology.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you mean inscribed on the wire, that's the same as the Outer Limits episode "Demon With a Glass Hand" by Harlan Ellison. They had encoded data on a wire, then wrapped it for use as a solenoid, presumably to hide it from his pursuers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...which was mentioned in passing in the article.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No, it won't be a slow, bumpy ride to the bottom unless government gets out of control.
If anything, with more economic freedom in China, progress should accellerate even further.
The counter-intuitive result of Simon's observations is that, given economic freedom, people solve problems faster than they become serious problems.
Calm thy heart about the future, even with AGW.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I blame insensate modern programmers who severed progress indicators from actual measurement of progress. So seeing a spinning wheel or emptying trash or constantly refilling bar leaves you guessing as to whether the process has actually stalled, which was why progress indicators were created in the first place.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
USB cards back in the 1960s. Though it looks more like compact flash...
all the science fiction that thinks that every time someone copies a file it somehow magically disappears completely from the source computer and all backups. A lot of the time it seems like the people writing think that computer files are like paper files and things like backups don't exist.
Inscribed on the wire, yes. My understanding is that wire voice recorders preceded tape recorders. ...I just now looked it up, and wire recorders were invented just before the 20th century and were used up to 1960, primarily for dictation.
In many of Norton's early stories navigation was completely automatic, with the route encoded on tiny spools of wire. In Galactic Derelict (1959) humans accidentally launch a derelict alien space ship. Once they get to their destination, they have to use tiny precision tools to rewind the wire spool in order to get back home. This is apparently how we thought of storage back in the fifties.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.