for ten years now we've been on our own

[gfish]

I just offhandedly mentioned how it won't be too many years until we have the bandwidth and storage to constantly upload video from where ever we are, and the processing power to do some really amazing analysis on it. All of it, every single frame. Geocoded, timestamped, indexed, searchable, linked into a constantly evolving composite of reality. Available for the rest of human history.

15 years? 10 years? Maybe not even that.

10 years ago today I had just moved into the dorms, basically the only place in the world with a wired network and highspeed internet access. Seeing URLs in commercials was starting to seem normal and instant messaging had just been invented. The family had 2 cellphones -- one in my dad's truck, one the rest of us shared (and having that many was unusual). I wouldn't get my own for another 3 years. My brand new, completely tricked out going-away-to-college computer was 166Mhz with 3G of storage. It had a 28.8k modem, a 10Mbps ethernet card and it was just shy of the bleeding edge.

Goddamn but things are starting to get interesting. And happy 10 year Seattle anniversary to me.

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

"...basically the only place in the world with a wired network and highspeed internet access."

Er?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Hyperbole, yes. Though not entirely, and certainly not for home connections.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Available for the rest of human history? Either you have a very pessimistic view of the future of our species, or a very optimistic view of the longevity of digitial data. After all, the technological changes that will make this scan and catalog everything future possible will lead to changes in format that will make today's media and software as inaccessible as the Notabene files on 5&1/2" floppies from when I was an undergrad, lo these 15 years agone.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Hmm. By the mid ninties there were plenty of geek households with internal networks sharing out external highspeed connections, often with their own domains and servers and such. Especially in high rent high nerdity areas (like Boston and the Bay Area).

Not *common*, but not at all rare in the right circles. Craig and I had a home network but a lousy connection in 1996 (they promised us DSL in six months when we bought the house, and it continued to be "in six months" for the next few years). But we were also in the boonies where such amenities were less available.

[niac.livejournal.com]

Happy singularity. :)

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

When I moved into the Halls of Residence at Canterbury for my first degree in 1991, my weapon of choice for computing was a second hand Apple IIc luggable with a Panasonic 1081 dotmatrix*. Internet via phone line was possible, but difficult, and we mainly did that in the labs at Uni (No individual phones to our rooms, you see.)

The tech now available make me sometimes feel like a Sopwith Camel pilot sitting in the cockpit of a stealth bomber wondering which button to press.

*I managed to sell this to a suck^h^h^hNice young man in 1994 for $500. I didn't feel bad about that for much more than thirty seconds.

[mdlbear]

Storage, yes. Bandwidth, probably not.

Storage per buck is doubling roughly every year; that means that if you start recording now, you can keep doing it forever (until the curve levels off) for a total lifetime cost of twice the price of the first year. That's easy.

Wireless bandwidth, however, is not increasing nearly fast enough to keep up; its doubling time is several years. And if we keep adding users faster than we add channels, we'll never catch up. Sneakernet will continue to be the economical choice into the forseeable future. (Hint: with current SD cards, CPIP is faster than T1.)

[book-addict.livejournal.com]

Just yesterday I heard mention of a device that will store GPS information (location & direction) associated with digital video. (And I wish I could cite something, but it was one student presentation in the midst of many, and I wasn't paying that much attention.) That sort of simultaneously-created metadata I do expect to become common. Any additional indexing, the sort we humans are needed for ... probably won't be much more common than it is today. I don't think.

I'm going to take a middle ground on the "rest of human history." If something seems to have continued value, then it'll be kept alive, in some form or another. Most digital data won't be. Unfortunately.
(Though it's always possible the next 10-15 years will bring about major changes in electronic longevity. I've never been very good at predicting the future.)

Ten years ago I was starting high school, and didn't have my own email address. How life has changed.