If you’re going to send gifts to journalists or bloggers (or journalist/bloggers) don’t be ham-handed like Microsoft, be artful like EMC.
The EMC Information Calendar arrived here recently and it offers a treasure trove of tidbits, quotes, tech history and philosophy — only a slice of which is related to storage in the narrow sense. Great artwork, too. It’s exactly like one of those page-a-day desk calendars from The Onion or Dilbert, only for people who know that a petabyte is not an injury inflicted by an animal rights activist.
You can see today’s entry online here and it appears as though the daily pages will be archived (EMC has the technology). But let’s take a peek at what’s upcoming, too:
Jan. 3: “The (first disk drive in 1956) stored 2,000 bits per square inch. In disk drives today, the figure is as high as 135 billion bits per square inch. That’s almost a 70-million-fold increase. And in the next five years, we will ship more disk drives than we shipped in the first 50 years.”
— Currie Munce, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Don’t you just love expressions like “70-million-fold increase” that the mind can’t possibly fathom but sound so impressive anyway?
Jan. 4: “From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have ‘published’ at least 32 million books; 750 million articles and essays; 25 million songs; 500 million images; 500,000 movies; 3 million videos, TV shows and short films; and 100 billion public Web pages.”
— Kevin Kelly, “Scan this book!” New York Times, 5/14/06
And, by the way, not as many of those 100 billion pages as you might think are porn.
There are a fair number of less-than-memorable entries and old chestnuts (May 18: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”), but you can flip the thing open to just about any page and find something amusing or enlightening. For example:
May 2: Lieutenant Commander Data is an android who serves as the second officer and chief operations officer aboard the starships USS Enterprise-D and USS Enterprise-E. Data was built with an ultimate storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits (approximately 88.8 petabytes.)
— Wikipedia
I dare anyone to admit they knew that bit about the 800 quadrillion bits.
Jan. 24: “On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog. The blogosphere continues to double in size every six months. As of July 2006, more than two blogs were created each second of each day. There were about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second, about double the volume the year before.”
Yup, we’re talking fad here, all right.
Feb. 2: “The first digital computer in 1944 filled an entire room and cost around $1,000,000. Today, an equally efficient computer fits in a 5-by-5-foot filing cabinet, and sells for less than $200,000. Someday soon, big computers will be reduced to the size of a shoe box and sell for several hundred dollars.”
— “The New Age,” Time Magazine, April 27, 1957.
They missed the part about accessing them in every coffee shop and airport, but it was 1957.
Nov. 8: “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’re created life in our own image.”
— Stephen Hawking
Who am I to argue?
Dec. 28: “There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death; there’s brain death; and there’s being off the network.”
— Guy Almes.
That leaves only 357 pages to go.
Want a physical copy of this calendar for your own desk? Sorry, friends. “They’re not for sale … maybe next year,” an EMC spokesman tells me.
Take that, Microsoft — anyone can go out and buy an Acer Ferrari.
