Visions of storage...

Twenty five years with your hands on technology gives you a pretty good feel for where things are going. You can extrapolate.

I was there when the microprocessor was born. A forty-pin wonder that you could wire into a circuit (I was a digital electronics design engineer back in those days) and you could write assembly language to make things happen. You need to appreciate why this was so special to us. We knew hardware. We knew what registers were because we had burned our fingers connecting the chips together, and so "LD AL, 20H" made perfect sense to us. It meant we could eliminate fifty wires on our circuit board just by getting that two-byte instruction burned into an EPROM. Ask the 'Woz', he'll tell you how exciting that was.

But I stopped writing assembly code less than ten years later. Why? Too much effort. Let's do it in 'C'. Sure we lost sight of the details of how it worked. We had to trust the compiler writers. We had to build bigger memories because the code size quadrupled. We had to get floppies working to hold all this code because we were writing it faster than our microcomputers could hold it. Complexity was increasing as fast as Moore's Law could build better chips. It seemed like a simple linear progression. More code, more features, bigger programs.

Then something happened that changed the way we thought about systems. The hard-drive appeared. This was permanent storage. Yeah, so were floppies if they didn't fail, but this was something esoterically different. Up until then, your program resided on a disk, was inserted when needed and kept all its state on that disk; that program was separate from all others. It was logically independent. The hard drive changed that because all programs and their settings were now on the same slab of magnetics. Now the first program could know about the second program. The 'application' was born: lots of programs cooperating to do a much bigger task. Most importantly, the hard drive became a universal place to store anything related to you. Your entire computing history was intertwined through settings on that drive. It was a good thing, you could tune your desktop to your own preferences. The sad thing was when that hard drive crashed, you would waste weeks re-tuning to almost get back, and after the fourth crash, (or computer upgrade) you stopped tuning. It was too disheartening to start again.

Where are we going next? In very abstract terms, it is clear to me that everyone is going to store everything on the Web. That's it. Simple as that. Today's hard drive will become just a caching device to speed things up. No one will be willing to be locked into having one computer hold their life, because computers are just silicon and there's so much of it out there. Why aren't we there yet? Trust. There are online companies that offer to mirror your computer up to their secure data centers, but you have to take that on faith. They say it uses XYZ encryption and that their techs are bonded and equipment is protected by guards and dogs and walls of concrete. Trouble is, nobody wants to fly out to Colorado to see if that is true. And yet, people want the convenience of letting somebody else deal with the storage thing. Just like paying for TV, electricity or the phone bill, it comes naturally.

Something is going to come along that solves the trust issue. Then its all going to flip. We'll all have our user-centric view of our data and we'll look at it from different devices depending on what's convenient. We'll use one of the company's big-screen workstations with the ergonomic mouse when that's handy. We'll use a laptop when we're on the road. We'll use a Treo or a BlackBerry when we're in a cab. We won't think about whether our data is safe from theft or loss because, duh, it's on the Web.

We'll get there. You want to be there.