Talk by Gary Bridge from Cisco.
Some interesting comparisons here – in 1959, 1Mb of storage cost $10,000 – now 120Gb costs under $100.
If this type of increase in storage continues, in 20 years you will be able to buy terabytes of space on a small disk device. I’m afraid I haven’t got the figure he quotes, but he has said that the kind of size he is talking about could hold 315 copies of every song ever recorded.
The really important thing here is that this is not a ‘by 2100’ prediction – the timescales he is talking mean this is going to happen in my working life.
Moving on to communication – in 1896 the fastest way of communcating across distances was by telegraphy – at 20-75 words per minute. With typing, we go up to around 150 words per minute.
Just as a an aside, he has just said that when typewriters were first introduced, only men used them, because it was seen as a technical/mechanical task!
With speech we go to 125-180 per minute
and – sorry to leave you hanging, but at this point I had to leave the talk to sort a problem back at base, so I’m afraid that we’ll never find out what the future of communication is – a shame, as it was shaping up to be an interesting talk.
Normal service will be resumed for the next talk…