We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.
I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.
There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.
The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.
In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.
We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.
Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.
Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.
This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.
Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.
For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.
1.5 GB total.
That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.
All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.
If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.
If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.
There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.
To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger:
Comments
2 responses to “The Internet Is Forever”
A good way to see that not just current content but old content remains available is to spend a bit of time with archive.org, the “Internet Wayback Machine”. That’s particularly good for dealing with broken links (pages that went away and now produce 404 errors). Enough so that Wikipedia routinely uses archive.org links for now-deleted content.
Something else: some systems remember all changes. Github is an example, that of course is its purpose. Wikipedia and related websites do the same: if you click on the “History” tab of any page you can see the entire change history, including all the vandalism and repair of same, as well as changes that were reverted by the Powers that Be. You get to see whether such reversions were justified or were an abuse of editorial discretion. (I can cite some examples of both.)
and if you ever run for office each and every little tiny thing you did on line will be spotlighted like charlie manson ..heh.