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.
When I was about 14, a friend of mine got a computer at his house. It was a Commodore 64 and I thought it was the world's coolest machine. We used to play a game on it where we got to be athletes in the Olympics. I also remember the huge 5 1/2 inch floppy disks that went with this machine. These machines were called a 64 because they had 64 kilobytes of memory, a leap for the time, but something that seems almost laughable now. When I got my first home computer, it had a massive one gigabyte hard drive and I paid a lot of money for it. Over the last several years, storage space has expanded massively until now I am shopping for a 160 gigabyte portable, external hard drive. A lot of the reasoning behind the need for expanding storage devices is because of the way our computer use has changed. While you can fit dozens of word processed documents onto a single floppy disk, only a few digital pictures fills one up. A few seconds of video far expands the 1.44 MB that a floppy holds. My Apple laptop doesn't even have a floppy drive, and with the CD burner, I've never missed it. CD burners became common a few years ago when they fell in price and when blanks CDs fell to the range of $1 each. Now they are standard in just about every machine made. The same is now happening with DVD burners and blank DVDs. In the range of $16 each, two years ago, blank DVDs are now below $5. While CDs hold around 650 MB, DVDs hold over 4.7 GB of information each, a clear advantage if you deal with music or video. Last week the first commercial dual Ð track DVD burners hit the market, recording data on two separate layers on a single DVD, doubling their capacity to over 9 GB. The problem is that CDs and DVDs are not as indestructible as they have always been advertised to be. People with CDs over 10 years old are beginning to find they are susceptible to a form of rot. Take your old CDs and hold them up to the light. You may be able to see tiny pinpricks of light shining through. This is the first sign of CD rot, the oxidizing of the aluminum layer that actually holds the data. The way that optical disks are actually made is constantly changing. But the basic process involves sandwiching a very thin layer of aluminum between two layers of a plastic lacquer. People are generally very careful to ensure that they do not scratch the bottom of these disks, but most of the damage to them is actually done from the top. The protective plastic layer on the top where the label is can be quite thin, so anything sharp can scratch through and damage the aluminum itself. The other problem is that something sharp penetrating through the plastic layer exposes the aluminum to the air, causing it to oxidize and break down. This is what the tiny pinpricks of light shining through the disk are, the layer of aluminum breaking down. Storage space is rapidly falling in price and with the options of CDs, DVDs, and hard drives available, it is becoming easier and easier to digitize everything from documents, through photos and home movies. The next year will see hard drives reach the one terabyte size (1,000 GB) and then the possibilities will be endless. ([email protected])
