The first computer I owned, bought in the early eighties, was a CP/M system from Epson, the QX-10. This system ran something called "Valdocs," and was mostly a word processor with a small screen featuring pale green words on a dark background, almost no memory, RAM or ROM, and software that was, on its best day, buggy.
My then-collaborator and I learned how to send files back and forth over something called "the internet" at the blazing speed of 300 baud, which was almost as fast as I could type!
Now and again, that first system would start to print the letter "D" over and over onscreen, and nothing could be done to stop it, save to shut down and reboot. And that wasn't the half of it.
The second time I saw Sorry, that file does not exist, I nearly threw the thing out the window. I spent many an unpleasant hour cursing the machine and the people who made it, as I tried to get it to do what it was supposed to do.
Since that first home computer, I have owned perhaps a dozen more systems, each of which was bigger, stronger, less buggy, and more reliable than the previous one. The current machine on my desk is more powerful and has way more memory than the first six or eight computers put together, and is generally very stable. Shoot, the flashmem stick back-up is the size of my fingertip, I can carry it on a keychain, and it has what? two hundred times as much memory as the first computer did, storage and operating system combined? Way more, anyhow ...
Point of this is, I learned very early on, to BACK EVERYTHING UP! and that being a belt-and-suspenders operator was the only way to go. Sooner or later, all systems crash, and only the Boy Scout motto will save you blowing an artery when it happens.
Currently, I save my work file to disk every two or three pages. Each time I get half a chapter or so, five or six pages, I back it up to a flashdrive. At the end of each work day, I also email a copy of the complete book ms to myself and leave it on my server, so that even if my hard drive dies and the flashdrive goes belly up, I will still be able to download a copy onto a different machine. Every month or so, I burn everything onto a CD, which goes into the gun safe.
Belt, suspenders, safety pins, sashes.
I am compulsively careful.
And even so, yesterday, I lost eight pages of the book in progress. Worse, I have no idea how. I saved it, backed it up, and when I reopened it, they were gone. I checked the automatic backup file for the word process. Made visible all invisible files. Cursed like a battleship full of sailors who just found out they had the clap.
All to no avail. Gone. Poof.
Yeah, it's great living here in the future and all, and I wouldn't go back to the days when we couldn't go play in the ditches when it rained because our mothers told us we'd get polio, but never once did my typewriter burp and say, Sorry that file doesn't exist ...
Or, Ho! That's a good one on me ...
Ooooooohh...Shit. I'm sorry old man. I too have lost an entire section of a book I was writing when I cooked a hard drive. I actually had started looking into data recovery sites (Fucking Expensive is tame a phrase) when I realized I had printed an earlier copy and sent it to a friend. He graciously scanned the pages into a large PDF & sent my own work back to me so I could re-type it & remember what I was doing with it. However, my long suffering and hard stolen MP3 collection was gone daddy, gone.
ReplyDeleteThe blowing an artery comment is spot-on. I'm still recovering from it.
I now have an external full terra drive mirrored to my computer, with backups every day. I also keep DVD backups for things like my books, videos & critical files that I update once a month. It takes me about half a day to go through this whole process.
Time WELL spent.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI think you may be wrong about the memory stick, by an order of magnitude at least.
Also, try setting up a script to automatically email your works-in-progress to a Gmail account or the like. That works as a great rolling backup. You'll never lose anything ever again.
Terras and Mirras et cetera are great but they're still an on-site backup.
For larger files there are services like box.net which also allow you to embed cool download boxes right on your blog. Snazzy as hell.
I don't think they run CP/M though.
You are right about the magnitude.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a computer-literate kind of guy. The flashmem stick is two gigs, and the OS for the old Epson, which has been gone for almost twenty years, by the by, was loaded on a 256K floppy. The storage was onto a 512 floppy, as I recall, until I later got a 10 meg hard drive the size of a toaster and boosted that. At the time, I didn't expect I'd ever be able to fill it up.
Yes, we're climbing the doubling curve.
ReplyDeleteMy law of technology:
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced, will seem ho-hum and old hat when it finally arrives."
In five years or so, IBM has announced that they'll be releasing an 80-core machine.
80 processors.
They say that each processor will be running at 3 ghz or so, but I think that's a bit of a lowball, and I also think that five years may be a long estimate. I think because of the announcement, AMD and other processor vendors will be trying the same thing and they'll be trying to undercut IBM, and to come out with milestones along the way. Expect a 20-core processor within 18 months. Even the PS3 "Cell" processor is 18 cores, as I recall.
And of course, the processors are now designing other processors. That's what the singularity curve supposedly comes from.
You people are prophets-- I just wish you'd write about a future of green meadows.
Well, I suppose we all do have a future of green meadows sooner or later. But you get the point.
'According to Fortune magazine, here’s what Watkins said about Seagate’s ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." '
ReplyDelete"You people are prophets-- I just wish you'd write about a future of green meadows."
ReplyDeleteNot me. Anything we predict that happens to happen is pure chance and coincidence. Nobody I know has a working crystal ball.
My favorite future-computers are biological, viral/molecular ,or sometimes made from the visual purple cloned from eyes. IBM hasn't gotten them on the drawing board yet.
Better to bypass real science when writing about the future. I kinda like how FTL radio works in my Matador universe. It uses a particle called the "impious chronon ..."
When our library burned, they figured at least the backup of their catalog was safe, seeing as how it was stored in an off-site computer. But as luck would have it, the off-site machine suffered a major crash and now they get to re-create the entire catalog...by hand. The technical term for this situation is "bad computer juju" and only the application of large amounts of money will effect a cure. When the library's catlog is re-built, they figure to store it on three different machines, all in separate locations. This, of course, is no guarantee against future disasters as bad computer juju knows no limits.
ReplyDelete"My favorite future-computers are biological, viral/molecular ,or sometimes made from the visual purple cloned from eyes. IBM hasn't gotten them on the drawing board yet."
ReplyDeleteWell, DNA computation has been around long enough to make me almost certain that the Gummint has it available for crypto-smashing, or at least has evaluated it fully. I used to subscribe to SBIR (ARPA procurement catalog for small-business innovation) and I remember them saying something that sounded suspiciously like DNA computing for cryptanalysis.
Visual purple? Well, there's bacteriarhodopsin, which as I remember is kind of purple. It's a type of bacteria that turns purple (I think) on response to light. In the 80s they were investigating using blocks of the stuff in some sort of cubic matrix as a 3D storage mechanism. Very fast addition operations could also probably be performed by shining a laser through a block of the stuff. That all depends on switching speed.
The 80-core processor is slated to use laser beams for internal processor-processor data buses.
In theory, people are building quantum computers, too, but there's a long way to go before they come up with one you can plug-and-play at home.
ReplyDeleteFascinating stuff, though ...
I used to do Windows 95 phone support for Microsoft and got a call from a gentleman who had just finished a novel. Since he now had time to deal with all the problems his laptop was giving him he called up the hardware vendor who suggested that he use his system restore diskettes to bring his computer back to the condition that it was in when he purchased it. The vendor didn't suggest he back up anything first, nor did they explain that this would literally be the condition it was in when he purchased it - nothing but Windows and the original vendor software, reinstalled over a freshly formatted hard drive.
ReplyDeleteI explained what had happened and suggested that he not use his computer for anything until he had talked to a data recovery specialist. It was the only support call I ever took that ended with an adult man in tears.
I tell people that if they want to avoid data loss (for the most part) that they have to understand and live with the idea that the sole purpose for a computer's existence is to loose data. All of their nifty functions, word processing, email, games, etc. etc. are to sucker people into putting data on them in the first place so that they can fulfill their role as data disposals.
Don't give them the chance. Backup, make extra copies, store anything important off site as well and maybe you can avoid disaster. For a while...