Week 1: From personal data to personal information medium

Thirty years ago, the phrase “loss of information” for an ordinary person meant, most likely, the loss of a notebook. To understand what it means today, it’s enough to imagine an average laptop and mentally turn a cup of coffee on it. Or forget it in the train; or present with a dozen other fairly everyday choices - from a viral attack, to over-naughty children. On the one hand, a more or less thin notebook, on the other - photos and videos, work and text files, scans of documents, databases, media collections. Not to mention the applications or even bookmarks in the browser, which can also be important for its owner. Of course, in the notebook could be much valuable, but in general the comparison is clearly not in her favor. There is a set of records and contacts, and here is a whole digital environment.

What has changed over the past thirty years - besides the obvious fact that we all got personal computers?

A million times in thirty years

When IBM released the first publicly available computer in 1981, most potential users didn’t really know why they might need it. All the PC could do with it was the management of the family budget in the Excel prototype and typing in the predecessor of Word. In fact, it was a hybrid calculator and typewriter.

The volume of what could fit on such a computer today will make smile. Hard drives appeared in 1956, but by the early eighties they were still too expensive and cumbersome. Therefore, in the early models of computers used removable floppy disks. The operating system was loaded from one floppy disk, and all the information was stored on the other. The volume of floppy disks was standard - 166 KB.
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Floppy disks often broke down and slowed down computers, so hard drives were quickly optimized for PCs. But even in this updated form, the capabilities and volumes of computers remained quite modest. Someone else remembers how in the early 90s he bought a system block with a 30 MB hard drive with the confidence that such a large memory would be enough for a long time.

Today we all know well that many lack a computer with a disk for one or two tarabytes. A simple calculation shows that in thirty years the amount of data storage available to any person has grown a million times.

The speed of work also did not stand still, and as a result we received not just an alternative to a notebook, but also completely new types of content that began to claim a qualitatively different place in our life. Games, graphics, multimedia, Internet, mail, news, social networking. The computer has become a universal tool with which you can draw a drawing, watch a movie or book a hotel on the other side of the world. Almost everything that used to exist on paper or film has become digital and, moreover, is easily accessible.

New ecosystem

For a quarter of a century, personal information became the information medium: it went digital, became extremely diverse, focused on one or two or three devices, and together with the Internet formed a whole ecosystem around a person. And this ecosystem is constantly expanding. The speed of processors and devices is growing, and the cost of storing a megabyte of data steadily drops by 50% every 14 months.

• In 1956, a 3.75 MB hard drive cost $ 34,500;
• In 1980 a 5 MB hard drive cost $ 1,595;
• In 2014, the price for a 3 TB hard drive was only $ 105.

It remains to return to the beginning of the article and recall the phrase "loss of information." How accurately does it describe what can happen at any time with your laptop, tablet or smartphone? Today - unless we are talking about separate files - we can increasingly talk about the risks for a complex whole - for the digital environment we are used to.

Of course, individual files can also cause a lot of distress and hassle: if the work done is lost or, for example, a family photo archive. It’s harder to lose everything at once: data, system and application settings, web browsing history, and in addition to that, the time it takes to restore what you can.

Statistics is an inexorable thing: the loss of personal data at least once happens to everyone. Someone has already come across this, someone else will, and perhaps more than once. Data loss occurs more often than you can imagine. Given the variety of internal and external factors, the question is NOT IF you lose the data, but WHEN it happens.

How to make your life easier and minimize the risks that arise, let's talk in the next article.



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