Originally humans created information and passed it along to others through verbal communication. In a way this is the most basic form or data storage. This is still present today in the forms of myths, or stories. Anything you heard that someone else hear that someone else heard is a form or verbal recording. I won't get to into this as it is a simple concept and not that exciting, in this light.
A second form of Data recording is through the use of pictures or drawings. The most notable of the older drawings are cave drawings. The oldest cave drawings is approximately 40,000 years old and is located in northern Spain. Some debate if this is drawn by humans as at that time there were many more Neanderthals in Europe at the time making it much more likely that a member of that species. That said the average human is about 4% Neanderthal.
Moving on, the next form or information storage is through writing. Again this is something else that only humans have managed to do, as far as we know. Writing is interesting in the sense that as it formed all over the world sometimes without relation to the other forms, we end up with radically different forms of it all over the world, from Sumerian to ancient Egyptian to Old Chinese. Now, with the invention of writing there is the ability of accuracy that can't be held with verbal remembrance can't have do to the inability of humans to remember thing clearly. I doubt that this is a coincidence that this is the edge of our knowledge of human history. I think that this is the reason that religion is so prominent. After the creation of writing things didn't progress in this area for a long time, due to religion and the dark ages.
Byte = 8 bits
Kilobyte = 1024 Bytes
Megabyte = 1024^2 bytes
Gigabyte = 1024^3 bytes
Terabyte = 1024^4 bytes
Petabyte =1024^5 bytes
Exabyte = 1024^6 bytes
Zetabyte = 1024^7 bytes
Yottabyte = 1024^8 bytes
Right now the largest hard drive on earth is at IBM's research lab in California. It is an insane 120 petabytes. I know i punt the numbers up there but I want to write it out to show the size of it.
That's 1 160 568 786 830 044 007 717 928 960 bits. That's a little more than one Octillon bits.
Now bits are good but they are getting outdated. In the near (within the next hundred years) future computers will switch from using bits to using Qubits. The difference between the two is that a qubit is that rather then being either a one or a zero it can be both at the same time. Not that it now has three forms, one zero and both, but that it can tell the computer to do both at the same time. An easier way of thinking about it is if you think of how a computer would solve a puzzle. Right now a computer would go till it reaches a T section, at that moment it would take one turn and continue to make that one turn until it reaches a dead end. Then it would go back to the last turn and take the other rout. If it reaches a second dead end. It will do this over and over till it reaches a solution. But with a quontum computer (a computer using qubits rather than bits) would take all possible routs at the same time. This lets it reach a solution in a single 'move'.
Out side of the computer world some scientists have found a way to code information into DNA which would allow us to create biological safes of information. This is still in the developmental stage but it could help somehow in the future.
Where or how do you think we will store information in the future?
In the future, we will have digitized our heads and therefore will be able to store billions of Yottabytes therein.
ReplyDeleteThat's a yatta bytes! Ba-da-boom!