Interesting article from The Register, covering some research by Gordon Bell (no relation) from Microsoft. The project called MyLifeBits aims to model how much storage space one might need to store all of ones life digitally. the research was largely published last year, the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center Media Presence Group website has more details. The Register article slightly misreports the research, missing out the fact that the browser you use as part of the system captures every webpage you visit. Bordon Bell is now starting to capture all the phone calls, tv and radio he sees or hears. There is a recent paper, presented to ACM Multimedia in December 2002.
It is based on the Vannevar Bush's 1945 (biography) article from The Atlantic on the Memex, entitled "As we may think". The memex is an eletronic collection of your thoughts and writings, a sort of jourmal, it is widely regarded as the precursor to hypertext, of which the web is a simple example.
Certainly, I've gone from a vast 20Mb disk in 1990 to about 100Gb of fully portable disk space (60 on ti-book, 20 and 12 on externals and 20 on my iPod). I'm even idly considering buying a 120Gb disk for my linux box at home, at less than £100. When I had my 20Mb disk, 1G was a thousand pounds, so that is drop from a 1000 to less than 1 pound per gig. Disk capacity has really plummented in value in the last 2-3 years, so getting a terabyte of disk space is not ridiculous. If you live in the connected world, then all your life can become digital, certainly the next computer you buy will have disk most people will have difficulty filling, the street finds it uses though. Pictures, all my music, video, never delete any email, versioning systems for every document.
This makes the information sifting job much harder, I've got a 12G disk with the contents of 3-4 older machines (work and home) it is taking me months on and off to do the version comparison and filing of the documents and applications, then there are backup CDs etc. I could bin the lot, but each time I find something new I'd forgotten. Information archeology is a new skill...
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