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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1998 Disk space - the final frontier MANY of you will not remember and will never have seen the original 5.25in floppy disk mounted in a cardboard case. These were truly floppy, with 0.36Mb of storage capacity. Today, so-called 3.5in floppies, with very rigid cases, still dominate despite their limited 1.44Mb. Their slightly larger counterpart, the zip disk, provides 100Mb. There are now super-drives that accept and read/write to both 1.44 and 100Mb units. But relative to the size of today's work files and hard disk space on top-end PC products, a 1.44Mb floppy is increasingly useless. Even zip drives are severely limited for multi-media files demanding more than 100Mb. One PC manufacturer recently took the bold step of producing a machine without a floppy drive. It argued that such a small bandwidth is more appropriate to online access, and it is right. With the advent of high-speed modems, CDs and now DVDs, the floppy is a technology of the past. Floppy drives demand physical space, which laptop and PC frames can ill afford. It is time to say goodbye to this outdated technology, for it is about as relevant as a vinyl audio disc in a world of CDs. This year, my laptop life was transformed by the purchase of a 500Mb PCMCIA card hard drive. This unit is twice as thick as a standard modem and occupies the same slot. I can read and write to this unit in the same manner as my hard drive, with the advantage of plug compatibility with all makes of laptop. More important, perhaps, is the ability to interface with palm-tops, which usually have no floppy drives in order to save frame space. Here is a new and expandable universality - sufficient capacity and connectivity for our current state of IT - and a bridge between the online and off-line networked worlds. Portable PCMCIA hard drives with up to 6Gb capacity are now available. These use a standard format card as an extension to a rather bulky unit that will still fit into a jacket pocket, or find some corner in an average laptop computer bag. Increasingly, therefore, we can transport huge files by human hand from machine to machine. And this looks destined to become the dominant mode of communication if wideband network access is not made more universally available. With the clock rates of the modern PC now exceeding 300MHz, and 64Mb of RAM commonly installed as standard, complemented by more than 4Gb of hard drive, installed network technologies are fast falling behind. This is particularly worrying when we consider the price of such computing power. It was more or less constant in real terms with a doubling capability, but now it is beginning to fall rapidly. This is a process of positive feedback - exponentially more for exponentially less. The network technologies to match the growing capability and demands of PC-based communication are readily available. But the mindsets of those who install and own networks tend to be focused on the past, and the domination of narrow bandwidth. They tend to think in terms of 10Mb being a lot, and pose the question: why would a customer want more capacity anyway? This is the wrong question, and about as relevant as contemplating what people would do with a car when the world only had horses. Network bandwidth and connectivity is a Field of Dreams - build it and they will come. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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