Quick observation on technology and vision

About ten years ago I worked in the law division of a large company helping on the technology side of managing millions (millions and millions) of documents electronically and physically for legal discovery . The technology at the time used optical platters that each held about 6GB total and utilized a juke box to keep immediately available on line about 50 platters. There was a library of about 150 of these platters total, making this system have about 1TB of images and data taking up the space of several refrigerators and two tall book cabinets.

At some point a new company general counsel, Bob, started and he was inspecting the issues. He was a tech savvy guy and when he saw the platters and such, he was appalled. He said the data needs to get to hard drives and a better system. He said "in a few years I will be able to hold a 1TB hard drive in my hands".

Well it took about ten years: Bob now has that 1TB drive in his hands. Unfortunately, today the scale and scope of data within such a large organization means the a 1TB drive is no longer the vision it once was ("one place to hold ALL my data"); it is now the place all those emails and movie files get stored from one month for one person's activity.

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