Disasters and Recovery

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun Jan 17 22:00:57 1999

> We're talking 100 years here. Computers didn't even exist in 1899, and
> now you can wear one on a ring. I think aligning a 1999 hard drive, a
> physical item that is still very visible by the naked eye, will be among
> the more mundane tasks in 2099.

Repairing a 50-year old mechanical computing device can be difficult. Why
would you expect that repairing a 100-year-old electromechanical device
would be easy? Do you expect the universities to start turning out
thousands of Wesley Crusher clones or something?

Perhaps you're assuming that hard drive technology will be so advanced by
2099 that any twelve year old will be able to figure out that old 1999 stuff.
But that's not a very reasonable assumption. Just because the technology
gets more advanced doesn't mean that the older stuff becomes any simpler.
If we're still using disk drives in 2099, they might bear so little
resemblance to the ones we have now that few people will even remember the
details of how the 1999 drives worked. (After all, few people *now* know
the precise details of how the 1999 drives work.)

You look at a disk drive and say, "Oh, that's simple, a disk spins and an
actuator moves a magnetic head back and forth." But if it is so simple,
why didn't they have 18G 3.5 inch drives 25 years ago? Just like any
complex technology, there is an awful lot of detail that goes into making
it work. And a lot of that detail isn't written down on paper *anywhere*.
It's in the heads of the engineers. If we wanted to build Saturn V launch
vehicles again, for instance, a lot of things would have to be relearned.
Just because we have the engineering drawings does NOT mean that we fully
understand it or know what it takes to make it work reliably.
Received on Sun Jan 17 1999 - 22:00:57 GMT