Introduction by Jim Koch –
Dave Thompson received the inventor of the year award by the New York State Patent, Trademark and Copyright Law Association for his contributions to magnetic data storage technology.  Dave has been inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame in 1996 for his pioneering work in the design and development of thin film magnetic head technology for use in high-density data storage.  He has a very provocative title; one I understand made Ron Kilpatrick have heart palpitations this morning.  What do we do when storage is free?  So Dave thank you for being here.

Thompson's Biography

DAVE THOMPSON

Thank you, I have no where the title of my talk came from.  I saw it for the first time when the booklet came out and nobody will admit to have invented it.  So storage is not completely free. Since it is likely Al Hoagland's fault, in that case just let me bring up a little bit of history with the respect to that last speaker’s (Eric Brewer) request for basically a drum replacement with a  fixed head per track.  I have personally been involved in four projects over thirty years at IBM with that in mind and the last one was called the Benchmark Program that was lead by Al Hoagland.  This was a project to have more heads per track heads so you did not  have to do servoing as there would always one of these heads centered well enough over the track. It works fine, the only flaw with it is the cost is much more than you would be willing to pay for the same capacity in a conventional drive This is one of these ideas that comes back with each generation of new engineers in IBM and I am sure we will be looking at it five or six more times. Anyway, the purpose of this panel session is to do some brain storming. It is always hard to make predictions and especially about the future so I want to encourage you guys to speak up. This is not a sermon and I really want you guys to say something when I say something provocative but first I am going to show you a couple of historical foils.

  The first rule in the industry, as we are painfully aware, is that disk prices have been falling. Also, there has been a lack of discipline in the semi-conductor industry and a similar lack of discipline in the storage industry so that prices are falling even faster that they ought to be.   The sixty percent annual growth rate, and that is because this is something you have heard mentioned many times, means the areal density has increased by six and half orders of magnitude since the RAMAC.  That is a incredible improvement in storage density. What I want to do is a little bit of brainstorming based on what we just keep doing and suppose we get another three or four or even six orders of magnitude improvement. I want to remind you of a few other trends. One is that machines are getting more uppity than they used to be. Machines can do more because they understand more about the environment and they have expert systems in them that know when to nag you.  What about these words themselves.  They were all in the dictionary a 150 years ago. They are not new words. You know what your grandfather thought the computer was?  Computer in the dictionary is a guy who computes. A secretary was someone to keep things going. Today most of them are still human being but I can almost guarantee you that our grandchildren will think of the expert secretary as part of the expert system software for you desk top. How many people today actually have their own secretary, well some of you do, but you are the elite guys.   New hires don't get secretaries and they are lucky if they get a twentieth of a human secretary. This role will be replaced by something on your desktop.  The library again used to be a place full of books and encyclopedias, that is, a stack of books.  That is not going to be true for your grandchildren you can count on that. 

I want to focus today on a diary and particularly kind, the one that I am thinking of is a prompting diary. and what it could come to mean.  First of all, I need to overcome some prejudice.  People don't like to think that they need augmentation, prostheses, hairpieces, whatever but your used to having a lot of these things.  I mean shoes go back a long way.  People have a poor sense of time, I would guess almost everyone in this room has a wrist watch or a purse watch or whatever.  Most of you have eyeglasses because your eyes are not very good, some of you have hearing aids and a lot more of you need hearing aids.  I think most of you have been to the dentist okay and you are not to proud to have a little augmentation on the natural loss of dental acuity over the years.  Most if you own a calculator because you are just not that good at arithmetic. The memory prosthesis which I will now describe is not yet feasible but we don't have to go much further. another ten or fifteen years, before it will not only be as feasible but it will be inevitable.  It will be a part of your wearable computer and it is going to contain several components one is this little disk drive that we see people waving around today with 340 megabytes.  We are going to have disk drives in your doorknobs, disk drives in your toaster, disk drives in your automobile and if they were just a little bit cheaper we would have them everywhere -- certainly in the future.  We are going to be using a wearable computer.   Here are a couple pictures from a wearable computer project at IBM but I can assure you that every university has got something like this going and the military have plenty of these things.  This particular wearable computer is about the size of a walkman and the assumption is that when you go out in the morning that you are going to have your wallet, wrist watch, your purse and you wearable computer and you wouldn't go anywhere without your wearable computer thing  Ten or fifteen years from now it may not be one piece but maybe talking to your cellular phone your ear implant, your watch, your pager.  Power sneakers are sort of a joke to get rid of the batteries and power it from piezo electric crystals in your shoes.  Anyway, let me just take it for granted that your grandchildren have a wearable computer and that wearable computers have alot of storage.  Now how much is alot of storage?  A 100 years is about 3 billion seconds or 3 gigaseconds.  If your laptop or your wearable computer has one of these little drives today and a pair of 18 or 16 gigabyte drives at home it can download your stuff while you are  sleeping.  You could easily have a program that stored ten bytes per second for a 100 years and it would fit in this little database.  While there is not much what can you do with ten bytes per second remember we have been coming along in 6o percent annual growth rate in storage density. 

John pointed out that we can certainly get to a 100 gigabits per square inch thus  there is no question that you could store 2 kilobytes per second for a 100 years in your diary.  If we get another million or so further advance  in today’s density we could store 10 megabytes per second..  And  this is before we start talking about throwing away the junk while you are asleep.  Your diary does not have to store anything that you don't have to store like the 500th copy of some particular music that you like.  Let me just mention that we have not heard much about software today but in the database area there is a lot of software work going on, data compression, speech compression,  image compression.  In fact a 100x compression ratio is not particularly unusual with speech recognition  You can search a data base today by images, you can ask your picture database for a picture of a white seagull and it will look through ten or a hundred thousand images until it finds which ones have a white seagull in them.  You can take an audio record of a meeting lets say and you can ask for whenever the word "Microsoft" was spoken and it will index them just like that for you and play you a ten second clip if that is the certain thing that you want.  This is today's state of the art in software and in a generation should be perfectly feasible when you go home at night for your wearable computer to talk to your base computer and for them to go through and recognize the face you have seen, recognize where you set your car keys and compress all this information, index it and then put it in the data base while  keeping the most interesting one percent in the wearable computer.  What I am saying is that somewhere between 100 and a million times areal density of what we have today will make this feasible.  You wont have to forget anything because your watch or your eyeglasses or whatever, even everything you have ever seen and everything you have ever heard will be stored for you. 

When you see some guy walking or muttering to himself he isn't actually senile but he is saying who is that guy over there and his wearable computer is answering through his hearing aid exactly where you have seen that guy before and why.  And anything else you want to ask by just muttering to your wearable computer now and, by the way, this is independent of always being connected to the web which is a different view of the future  What I am talking about is a personal data base, it is a wearable prompting diary and all of the essential parts of the thing are being worked on today.  Every time I have made this proposal to a group of people, three or four people leap up of the chair, saying I hope I never this since the privacy issue looms so large. First of all, if you want privacy can you turn it off or can you erase the information.  If the data is well encrypted can somebody on the outside some authority force access to it?   That is one whole set of issues and those are technological issues which I think are perfectly solvable.  There is a different set of issues that have to do with other people's privacy and with legal regulations..  I am told today that in a public form like this one or in a hallway like outside I can legally photograph you all, I can have a video camera in my eyeglasses and that is not a problem but I can not record what you say because it just happens to be illegal to record conversations but not video  I mean this is a quirk in the laws and those laws vary in every town and country and state and country in the world.  There are a whole lot of legal issues and, of course, the lawyers would like to be well employed.  You might make an hypothesis that in the two generations from now that your public persona is not private.  If you are in a meeting like this you more or less have given permission to be recorded whether you are in a private conversation or with someone else. I would really love to know if a wearable computer becomes a fashion issue, like body jewelry.  If it exists it could become a status symbol, like the Rolex and the cellular phone before everyone got one.  but the real point is this one for a business man or a professional person how can you afford to be the only guy in the meeting who forgets things?  You will not survive as a professional person two generations hence if you don’t have my little invention.