There’s a new exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which the Ur-Guru and I enjoyed a visit to a few years ago. The exhibit is called “Revolution: the First 2000 Years of Computing.” What? Two thousand years? Yeah, you thought the Babbage Engine was old, but the Antikythera Mechanism dates back to the 2nd century BCE. The Computerworld article about the exhibit … [Read more...]
How Much is 295 exabytes?
http://www.vimeo.com/19779116 Our need for storage—and potential for backup bottlenecks—has grown 23% every year since 1986, according to a study by Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez. And we're at nowhere near the storage or information-processing capacity of nature. Hat tip to Computerworld. … [Read more...]
Is Online Backup Bad for the Environment?
Disclosure: this post contains Amazon affiliate links. I bet you’re smart enough to figure out which ones they are. As we were driving back from Palm Desert to Pasadena earlier this month, the Ur-Guru pointed out a problem with the current craze for cloud computing. No, not the problem I’ve talked about before—slow broadband or no broadband at all making it impractical if not impossible to store … [Read more...]
Enter the Millipede: Huge Storage Capacity, Tiny Package
How many DVDs can dance on a postage stamp? 25 of them, if the stamp in question is IBM's new prototype Millipede storage chip. The Millipede is essentially a punch card (anyone remember punch cards?) on an incredibly small scale. How small? You can fit a trillion bits (better known to geeks as a terabit) into one hole on an old-fashioned paper punch card. And it's rewritable. The technology … [Read more...]
Backups are Big Business
According to Investors Business Daily, storage has become a $50 billion market, rife with competition. Storage is a growth sector because data is a growth sector. "The world produces 250 megabytes of unique information per year for every man, woman and child on earth," writes IBD's Brian Deagon, citing a study by UC Berkeley. (What I want to know is how they figured that out.) Remember to … [Read more...]
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