How Science Fiction Imagines Data Storage (hpe.com) 78
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.
Rollerball bubble memory (Score:2)
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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 [electronics-cooling.com], 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 d
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See the vid. It was a "memory pool", and the bubbles rising indicated increased thinking -- whatever a memory pool is, the thinking is the bubbles rising through the memory pool.
The red was overheating, but clearly from the increased bubbling of increased thinking.
No, none of that makes any sense. It is Hollywood.
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Like the computer in Logan's Run... There is no sanctuary... LOL
Missing a few methods (Score:2)
- 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?
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- Writing data to DNA sequences (ST:TNG "The Chase")
There was an early James Blish novel where he uses DNA for memory (although i can't remember which one, ironically). The programing needed to run a military aircraft was stored in anaerobic bacteria so that if the aircraft was shot down, the containment vessel would rupture and the bacteria would die.... taking with them the secret programs. At least i think it was Blish. Been 40 years at least since i read that; seems some of my anaerobic bacteria may have already died.
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Clear crystals are a bad idea (Score:3)
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?
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When a ship hails another they open an audio and possibly a video feed to the other ship giving the standard information of who they are. The captain of the hailed ship then says whether or not to display the video when they reply. There are plenty of times that they make the other ship, or they make the "good guys", wait.
It's the standard thing that you get when you video call someone today. They see who is calling and can choose when to view your camera.
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For some reasons time travel is thought of as difficult but faster than light travel is thought of as easy and always settings allow high speed travel but leave time as a mysterious thing yet to be cracked.
Its called dramatic necessity - a space show needs FTL to get to the planet of the week, whereas too-easy time travel would mean that every week you'd have to contrive a new reason why you couldn't use time travel to resolve the plot.
Wrong. Faster than light travel is a huge problem. Time travel maybe not so.
Or, possibly, the two things are logically equivalent - one can always be used to achieve the effect of the other. But maybe your FTL drive won't work (or you may risk existence failure) if you try to use it to violate causality... or perhaps you just hate the paperwork caused
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They are used in fiction to enable certain plot developments in a story.
Here mainstream SciFi TV series have a very bad reputation for throwing these around carelessly, basically using them like magic while burying that magic under a myriad of technobabble.
From a story telling perspective I also have to disagree on the time travel vs. FTL thing. While both may be impossible for all we know, time travel is usually the far more lazy choice for a story writer as an
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You use different colours of crystal to separate them of course.
Reports to the Captain are clear.
Centauri porn are blue
Recordings from Commander Ivanova's quarters are green
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Or purple.
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But in purple, I'm stunning!
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Stargate also had unmarked data crystals. And control crystals.
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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?
IMHO one of the main reasons why CD-RW failed. (of course besides the battle vs. CD+RW, and plain CD-R becoming dirt cheap, solving also the labeling problem.)
The cloud, just say no. (Score:1)
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
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Andre Norton's space ships were like that, except they used wire spools instead of tape. (Which is an even older technology.)
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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.
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...which was mentioned in passing in the article.
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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
From the Article (Score:2)
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?
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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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'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.'
Okay, not gonna lie- that made me laugh.
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Cloud can haz cheeseburder thought? Rite?
Cloud can haz Taco Tuesday, or banned?
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It was obvious from the title and the author that it was going to be content-free.
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I don't know about the annihilation part, but I think a slow, bumpy ride to the bottom is more likely.
By the time people realize that shit is seriously screwed up it'll probably be too late do anything effective. (And it's possible things are there right now, we just haven't hit the "realize" part of the process.)
The world is fragile in lots of ways- global infrastructure, global economy, susceptibility to pandemic, etc etc.
The fact is that it would take a lot less work than most people think to turn shit u
Re: Those who forget the past... (Score:2)
Yes it is fragile it also won't disappear. People will remember the good old days
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No, it won't be a slow, bumpy ride to the bottom [juliansimon.com] 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.
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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.
Mommy lied to you (Score:2)
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 poin
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I had a note from the future of about 80 years from now. It read:
"Can you believe those idiots long ago, who hated landfills? What a boon of resources they are for us to open and sort with our robots!"
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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.
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Minority Report (Score:2)
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.
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Or his SSD simply has more throughput than typical office LAN cabling permits.
Considering that an NVME SSD can deliver a whopping 32GBit, you would need more than (because of transmission errors and the many quirks the different load balancing algos introduce) 32 bonded gigabit cables, and hardware capable of handling the link aggregation (which is not normally found in a LAN, and much more often found in a SAN instead) to get the same degree of performance.
It's probably just cheaper to dump it onto a fast,
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My bad, NVME can drive at 32gigaBYTES per second, so you would need appreciably more bonded ethernet cables than cited above, but that just makes it even more absurd to expect that in a LAN.
"Hold on, I have to plug in more than 256 bonded ethernet cables for my workstation, AND IN THE RIGHT PORTS--- Give me a bit to set that up ok?"
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Tons of security to stop some yokel from off the street from using it. Very little security to stop those in power from misusing it.
Very realistic.
Chronology of Gibson's memory devices? (Score:2)
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
The computer in Rollerball deserves mention (Score:1)
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Fahrenheit 451
Blade Runner 2049 (Score:2)
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.
Schlock Mercenary (Score:2)
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.
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What about (Score:2)
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.