CTRL-S We Hardly Knew Ya

In 1948 Norbert Wiener wrote that a computing machine should contain “an apparatus for the storage of data which should record them quickly, hold them firmly until erasure, read them quickly, erase them quickly, and then be immediately available for the storage of new material” (Cybernetics 4).

No small amount of the early history of computing was devoted to the search for a stable but also variable storage medium, which eventually arrived in the form of magnetic disk storage. The magnetic disk, which persists today as the device we call the hard drive, was also (unlike magnetic tape) random access. Increasingly, however, there’s evidence that the paradigm is shifting. As Mark Bernstein notes, the shrinking cost of memory means that throwing stuff out is no longer necessary. Google’s new email service, which attracted a lot of attention from privacy activists, has received less attention for the fact that all the mail is automatically archived and saved in perpetuity. And why not? Users get a gig of dedicated space, and it would take aeons to fill that up with plain text.

Next on the horizon may be holograpgic storage. A story in the May issue of the MIT Technology Review claims that one-terabyte disks are expected to hit the market next year. Holographic storage device can’t as yet be rewritten, however. But do they really need to be? A terabyte, after all, is enough to hold “a million novels, 250,000 MP3 song files, or hundreds of full-length movies.”

One wonders how soon CTRL-S will be an anachronism. The deliberate decision to save something will be a thing of the past. That’s the future we see in Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project—Bell has captured “a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.”

Look for indexing and visualization technologies to play ever larger roles in mining these massive veins of data. And for encryption to play an ever larger role in managing access to the digital residue of our individual experience.