I love living in the future.

[theweaselking]

New digital information storage: About a terabyte per square inch, should be stable in a temperature-controlled environment for about a billion years.

EDIT:
Old and busted: 4.7 gigabyte DVD.
New hotness: 47 terabyte DVD.

Comments

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I just started reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where the main dude has "Sony Megawafers" that are two centimeters wide and three millimeters thick. They are "each good for half a million words", which my stupid monkey brain + Google says is about three megs (or 62MB if he's using Word). Johnny Mnemonic's headdrive was better at a couple hundred megabytes, but you'd think it would have the luxury of more space given Keanu's noggin. Sci-fi writers are going going to have to start thinking up -bytes past yottas pretty soon if they want to keep up.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Tabletop RPGs have this problem. In Cyberpunk 2020, the blazingly fast top-of-the-line computer has a...wait for it...66 MHz processor. A lot of game designers now change the units to something fake that only exists within the game universe to avoid sounding ludicrous two years down the line.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

That worked well for the original Star Trek and stardates.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I like that Cyberpunk-as-a-genre never figured out cellphones.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

A cellphone in CP2020 costs $900, has no functionality beyond making and receiving calls, and doesn't come with voicemail. You pay extra for that with your service plan!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall "must get to a phone!" being a critical key point a few times in Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic. The books, I mean.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Fuck if I remember. I loved all that razorgirl-and-mirror-shades shit the first time I read it, and now I'm avoiding going back for fear I'll shatter the illusion.

[fearmeforiampink]

Re-read Neuromancer recently. Still good, end of it still sucks.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

This, although I didn't find the end so bad.

[fearmeforiampink]

I suppose it fits with the dystopian nature of Cyberpunk as a genre, but the 'nothing has changed' ending I disliked.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. I can understand that. Some of his other works have the world shifting as a result of events.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ah, but it didn't matter that Johnny's capacity was teeny, because he was a data *smuggler*. The purpose of his headmeats was to get your data from point A to point B undetected, not massive storage.

[anivair.livejournal.com]

Also, I know that the human brain stores a lot of data (some estimates are as low as 3 TB, but those assume binary memory, which is wrong and it's probably closer to 1000 terabytes). But how much of that is stuff like "tying your shoes" and "speaking". The only thing Johnny really got rid of was memory (not things he'd need for his daily life or automatic function like breathing). While the human brain holds a lot of data, I'm not sure that I have any thought on how much could be taken out safely (half? That might not be a bad guess, but it's probably high).

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Somewhere more than 50-75% and less than just the brain stem left.

[anivair.livejournal.com]

I also think that, much like some cloud computers, the brain can rework what it's got to work with to make it more effective, which is a neat idea. Meaning that my brain, being full sized, is probably less efficient than that guy's. But it's good to know you can lose that much and still be functional. (well, LOSE might be overstating the case, but you know what I mean). So with the right rewiring, you can probably wipe some memories and use about 75% of the human brain for storage. Good to know.

(apparently nobody told white wolf because the amount of data that can be stored sort of makes the fog of eternity stupid).

[fearmeforiampink]

Movie-Johnny's was 80-160GB and he ends up walking round with 320GB.