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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.
Ah, I found the movie sequence: https://youtu.be/qmTWhvWgST0?t...
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!
Information wasn't stored in bubble memory. That was a cooling tank, just like people use liquid cooling today. Mainframe computers used liquid cooling as far back as 1964, almost a decade before the movie came out. Similar to the article, the producers used what they knew about big computers (i.e mainframes) and back then it was liquid cooling.
You can tell the bubbles aren't the memory when near the end of the video it shows the "temperature" getting hotter (the red color) and the bubbles becoming more dense (just like what happens in boiling water).
HP's 'Enterprise' blog.
Yeah, it's a fucking advertisement. Way to pay the bills, Slashvertisements!
'Store your data in the cloud so we can sell more server-room class hard drive arrays! Don't store that shit at home. You know you what happens at home? Mexicans. Mexicans break into your house and steal the platters right out of your cheap TB hdds. DO NOT STORE YOUR DATA AT HOME. WE'RE BEGGING YOU!'
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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.”
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