The Next Monolith:

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• April-May 2007 Issue
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Twenty-five years ago …

I remember an event that looked a bit like the scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” when the primates awoke to the presence of the monolith at the center of their outcropping. It was a long time ago in a far away land known as Buffalo , New York . A friend of mine owned a store with the clever name, “ComputerLand,” in a strip shopping center on the north side of town. It was a store dedicated to the concept that people would go to a “computer” store to buy computers. This was a revolutionary concept 25 years ago. But I digress.

It was snowing. The UPS truck had just delivered around 10 boxes to the store from IBM — the same IBM that was the unquestioned leader of the really big computer market. These boxes contained the first generation of IBM’s Personal Computer, cleverly called the PC. We all watched in simian stupor as the proprietor unboxed the jewel of the shipment — The IBM PC-XT, a personal computer with an incredible 10MB Hard Disk Drive.

The discussion exploded.

“Ten Meg! Who will ever need all that storage!”

I reached out to touch the beige edge of the monolith. There was a sound (actually a beep) and a flash of light (a throbbing green cursor), and the machine roared to life.

Cut to the present day …

What could I have been thinking in the early ’80s? (I really shouldn’t even ask myself that.) Since the IBM PC-XT arrived with PC DOS 1.0 and a few really useful applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar, we end users have taken a long ride on the “WinTel” Express. We have watched the effects of Moore’s Law take hold as com puting power doubled every 18 months for the last 25 years. Our PCs grew in power and capacity almost as fast as the demands for that capacity were consumed by newer operating systems and applications.

The original PC-XT had 256K (that’s kilobytes to you youngsters) of RAM and the aforementioned 10MB of Hard Disk space.

Last weekend, I bought my teenage daughter an iPod Shuffle (her third iPod by the way), which has 1GB of storage in an object the size and shape of a hair clip. For the math challenged, 1GB is 100 times 10MB. This iPod cost $80!

When I look around my home, I am stunned by how many gigabytes of storage are under this roof. I have several PCs, Laptops (Apples and Windows), eight iPods, six TiVos, an Xbox 360, a Nintendo Wii and who knows what else? I have more than a terabyte of storage in my house! There are thousands of pictures and videos and music files, years of important documents and files, and many of them are irreplaceable. The digital revolution has removed the need for prints of photos and even CDs and DVDs, but one inescapable fact has gone unexposed.

All of these files are in danger!

Hard drives can fail. iPods can be stolen. Digital cameras can fall into the Baltic!