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rfmcdonaldA minor weakness of mine is for Star Trek tie-in novels, especially ones written by good authors. Doctor's Orders, published in 1990, was written by Diane Duane and thus fits both of my requirements. It's an endearing novel, describing how the Enterprise's survey of an unusual class-M planet is complicated by the disappearance of Kirk and the quirky regulations that placed McCoy in command. It's a fun novel, engagingly written in Duane's classic style and containing enough of the characters we're familiar with and enough interesting new scenarios to be an enduring item of pop-culture ephemera, even two decades after its publication. It reveals its age in only a single short passage delivered, in passing, in Kirk's pre-mission briefing of his officers.
I re-read Doctor's Orders soon after I bought a one-gigabyte memory chip for my camera for $C20.
(Yes, this passage leapt out at me.)
At roughly the same time, I found this picture of the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit, packaged for sale with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer, via this Marginal Revolution post. That's what five megabits worth of memory storage looked like back in 1956.
The invention of the first hard disk, as this 1984 brochure from the San Jose CA Magnetic Disk Heritage Centre makes clear, changed everything for computing.
Making information directly available for computer processing on demand meant that no longer would processors stand idle while searches were made through reels of magnetic tape or data was punched into cards and sorted for processing. Removing these obstacles helped turn the promise of the computer into reality and set the stage for what has come to be called the Information Age.
The pamphlet has all kinds of wonderful photos of the research effort and descriptions of the extended research and development period of the hard disk. The pamphlet is worth reading, as a historical record and as an artifact of a time when computer technology was just beginning to become something truly remarkable, something that would open up into capacities undreamt of by people writing years even after the pamphlet's publication.
(The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit would hold a single one of my photos, or a lossy mp3 from my archive of about nine gigabytes. Assuming Starfleet Command uses my camera chip for memory storage on Constitution-class starships, it would have cost the uniminaginable sum of $C1.6 million to properly outfit the expedition to 1212 Muscae IV with the eighty terabytes it was given. Surely that would be enough to hold all the information about the planet that you could want. That, or enough to store all of Kylie's dance remixes. Either way.)
I don't believe in the idea of the Vingean Singularity--the "rapture of the nerds," as John called it--but I am properly impressed by what the incremental improvements in our technology can lead us to. Respect.
Starfleet has kindly used this short layover to install an extra eighty terabytes of storage in the Library computers. I want to come hom wth that memory full, ladies and gentlemen. Be advised (26).
I re-read Doctor's Orders soon after I bought a one-gigabyte memory chip for my camera for $C20.
(Yes, this passage leapt out at me.)
At roughly the same time, I found this picture of the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit, packaged for sale with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer, via this Marginal Revolution post. That's what five megabits worth of memory storage looked like back in 1956.
The 350 Disk Storage Unit consisted of the magnetic disk memory unit with its access mechanism, the electronic and pneumatic controls for the access mechanism, and a small air compressor. Assembled with covers, the 350 was 60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep. It was configured with 50 magnetic disks containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric characters, for a capacity of 5 million characters.
Disks rotated at 1,200 rpm, tracks (20 to the inch) were recorded at up to 100 bits per inch, and typical head-to-disk spacing was 800 microinches. The execution of a "seek" instruction positioned a read-write head to the track that contained the desired sector and selected the sector for a later read or write operation. Seek time averaged about 600 milliseconds.
The invention of the first hard disk, as this 1984 brochure from the San Jose CA Magnetic Disk Heritage Centre makes clear, changed everything for computing.
Making information directly available for computer processing on demand meant that no longer would processors stand idle while searches were made through reels of magnetic tape or data was punched into cards and sorted for processing. Removing these obstacles helped turn the promise of the computer into reality and set the stage for what has come to be called the Information Age.
The pamphlet has all kinds of wonderful photos of the research effort and descriptions of the extended research and development period of the hard disk. The pamphlet is worth reading, as a historical record and as an artifact of a time when computer technology was just beginning to become something truly remarkable, something that would open up into capacities undreamt of by people writing years even after the pamphlet's publication.
(The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit would hold a single one of my photos, or a lossy mp3 from my archive of about nine gigabytes. Assuming Starfleet Command uses my camera chip for memory storage on Constitution-class starships, it would have cost the uniminaginable sum of $C1.6 million to properly outfit the expedition to 1212 Muscae IV with the eighty terabytes it was given. Surely that would be enough to hold all the information about the planet that you could want. That, or enough to store all of Kylie's dance remixes. Either way.)
I don't believe in the idea of the Vingean Singularity--the "rapture of the nerds," as John called it--but I am properly impressed by what the incremental improvements in our technology can lead us to. Respect.
