User:R6MaY89/Infinite storage

This is an article I wrote for my blog on 2005-12-12. You may comment on my talk page or my blog (see link below).

Historically, storage and bandwidth (amount and transfer speed) have been the most difficult challenges plaguing technology. Especially prevalent on free internet sites, low amounts of storage (a few megabytes) were provided by free hosts for a decade or so. The recent storage revolution of giving seemingly infinite storage away is often credited to Google for their mail service, Gmail. But I prefer to think that Wikipedia was the true initiater of said revolution.

Since their beginning, Wikipedia has given away an infinite amount of space for seemingly worthless information in terms of their History pages. Whenever a Wikipedia page is edited, the previous version and the changes are logged. These logs are to remain essentially forever as this is a requirement for their GFDL license. Because of the popularity of Wikipedia, there is always lots of vandalism. The vandals' changes are quickly reverted, but the entire text must be resaved in a new version. This means that Wikipedia must be prepared to store and trade a near-infinite amount of data. It seems worthy to note that this is different than any other companiy's tech business model. Most companies strive to limit disk space while Wikipedia appears to enjoy being a pack-rat.

The result of this change is that people can learn that there should be no limit on storage capacity. Theoretically, the human brain can be stretched to near infinite data storage and processing and so should computers. This change will occur over the next few years as hardware prices continue to drop and bandwidth too falls. In the mean time, companies like Wikipedia and Google will be at the forefront of the revolution. PermaLink