The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Our society is moving ahead at a tremendous rate. It is estimated that the amount of knowledge in any one domain, be it biological science, organic chemistry, or physics, is now doubling every year or so. It is also estimated that the average person from the 1600s or the 1700s saw less information in his or her lifetime than is contained in a single Sunday edition of the New York Times. I find these often repeated facts amazing. We are producing content at an amazing rate. It is just as incredible that much of this content disappears as soon as it is broadcast to the public. Television is a perfect example. Hundreds of channels, on 24-hours a day, filling every niche of content imaginable; but trying to get a copy of a broadcast after it has been shown is almost impossible. Before VCRs and now TIVO, researchers and fans alike found that once broadcasts were shown, they were almost impossible to get back again. The same is true for the web. You can wander down to the library in almost any North American town and pull out back issues of newspapers going back years. If you want to see what the response in your community was years ago to almost any issue, it is as easy as that, but the web is different. Sites constantly come and go, changes are made to material daily, and files are posted online to disappear only days later when your friends try to go to the fabulous new website you send them to. This worldwide presence is probably the most temporary source of content we have. Archive.org is trying to correct these problems. They have designed spiders, tiny pieces of code, which are constantly crawling, cataloguing and archiving a complete copy of the Internet. As of the beginning of 2003, they had collected over 10 billion pages of information and were adding almost another billion each month. This same organization is now doing the same thing with television channels and films. If you are looking for old films, their website is amazing and needs to be trolled through to be believed. This all comes down to storage. Floppy disks that hold 1.44 MB. used to be considered big enough for almost any job, able to hold hundreds of text documents. Soon photos and then video came along and megabytes gave way to gigabytes. My laptop has a 60 gigabyte hard drive that after a year I'm having trouble not filling up. We are now moving onto the next step, terabytes. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes and is a massive amount of storage. And now you can buy an external hard drive that holds a terabyte. Archive.org holds over 300 terabytes of data in what they call their Way Back Machine. This is the largest repository of knowledge in human history and their plan is to collect it all. Archive.org estimates that there has been approximately three million songs, two million distributed films, and twenty-six million books ever produced. The vision of Archive is to collect all of this knowledge, catalogue it, and make it available online for anyone to have free access to. Legal rights and copyright notwithstanding, Archive.org continues to collect information at a tremendous rate and hopes to produce a modern equivalent of the ancient Library of Alexandria. The trouble with our society isn't coming up with new ideas, it's remembering what we've accomplished. ([email protected])
