The Future of Computer Data Storage

I recently had a conversation with my father about the issue of data storage on computers. He is a first generation computer guy, from the days when mainframes were housed in aircraft hanger sized buildings and took small nuclear reactor to power both the computer and the air conditioners needed to keep them from melting under their own heat. And that was all just to store about as much data as is contained in a copy of a small paperback book. Or less.

My how things have changed.

Today I went out to the local computer store and bought a small memory storage card, known as an Smart Digital (SD) card. It has a capacity of 2 Gigabytes and it cost about $15. It's about the size and weight of a penny. To put that in perspective, my dad told a story of a day back in the early years of computers when the office he worked at, which was at a major University, got a new memory bank to install in the mainframe computer. It came in pieces - in the back of a flatbed truck. It cost thousands of dollars, weighed a couple tons, took a team of experts days to install, and had about 0.0000001% of the storage capacity of the SD card. Give or take a few zeros.

The SD card I bought today has more data storage capacity than every computer in the state of Michigan had in 1967. Combined. And you can likely toss in all the computers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois just for fun.

So what will computer data storage be like in another 40 years? I have no idea, but I can tell you for certain that it won't look anything like it does today. It certainly won't come on clunky magnetic disks that spin around like current hard drives do. What I do know is that it will data storage will be cheap, plentiful and very very portable.

There is lots of talk about holographic computer memory. But heck, in 40 years, even that could be "old school".

There is always the possibility that as the Internet grows, the need for personal data storage will disappear. Or at least become less important. Look at music and movies, which in digital form are just computer files. There are already sites coming on-line that allow you to stream movies on demand over the Internet. Say goodbye to DVDs. Similarly, I haven't used a physical CD to play music in about five years. It's all contained on small computer files, or streamed over the internet.

My personal computer that I'm typing this on contains very few files on it's hard drive. In fact, I'm writing this article in an on-line webware program called Google Docs. The data is stored by someone else (Google). Of course, there are privacy and connectivity issues with this, but those are able to be worked around.

Looking in to the distant (or maybe not-so-distant) future, it's not hard to envision data being stored on memory cards that interface directly with out central nervous system. Don't laugh, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. The central nervous system in a human (your brain) is run by a series of electrical signals, just like computer data storage. All that needs to be done is figure a way to get computers to talk to your neurons and WHAM - you can think your way around the Internet. OK, this connection is a daunting leap in technology, but so was the idea of landing on the moon to someone in 1925 - but it was done forty years after that.

In truth, we have no idea what data storage is going to look like in the next generation. But whatever may come of it, I'm certain that one day I'll be sitting around having a conversation with my kids, telling them about the day that I was willing to pay $15 for ONLY 2 Gigabytes of memory, on a chip so big you could still see it. Silly me, eh?