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What if mass storage were free? (1980)
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Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#12If mass storage were free, then everything would be append-only by default. There would be no excuse to not do this.
A major benefit of append-only is that your writes are always ideal for whatever storage medium. Especially magnetic or tape. Combine append-only with batching of transactions (i.e. across 1-10 milliseconds at a time), and you can write multiple txns per disk I/O operation (assuming txn size < storage block size).
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#13> Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever before. Other features of optical discs include improved reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is argued that optical discs fit the requirements…
1988: Schlumberger Cambridge Research takes possession of a new 1MB drive to be added to its VAXcluster. The drive is the size of ... a small refridgerator. It was quite a day!
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#14I just found this quite old paper and it came as a surprise to me to discover that the idea of append-only storage is not 20 years old but more than 40! The older work I was aware of is on "The design and implementation of a log-structured file system" (1) So this is with pleasure that I learned that these ideas was around in the 80: - Deletion considered harmful - A non-deletion strategy using timestamps - The impor…
the idea of append-only storage is surely older than pacioli
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper-based accounting was append-only, so I think the idea's always been there but was uneconomic in machine readable media for a long time. (in particular, "new master = old master + updates" card/tape jobs were in principle append-only but —due to finite number of tapes— in practice overwriting)
Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.
I don't think that was their point. If you went to a bank in the 1940s and made a withdrawal, they wouldn't pull your account slip, erase the balance, and write in the new one. They would add a new line to the ledger noting a new balance. This is by design.
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#16If mass storage were free, then everything would be append-only by default. There would be no excuse to not do this. A major benefit of append-only is that your writes are always ideal for whatever storage medium. Especially magnetic or tape. Combine append-only with batching of transactions (i.e. across 1-10 milliseconds at a time), and you can write multiple txns per disk I/O operation (assuming txn size < storage…
what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#17Leo Szilard's solution to the problem of Maxwell's Demon was that the acto of deleting data the demon must perform is the thermodynamically limiting factor. Deleting selective data efficiently is in fact one of the greatest challenges in large production databases, and in an era of increasing privacy restrictions like GDPR's right to deletion, an increasing challenge for database operators.
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#18> Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever before. Other features of optical discs include improved reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is argued that optical discs fit the requirements…
1988: Schlumberger Cambridge Research takes possession of a new 1MB drive to be added to its VAXcluster. The drive is the size of ... a small refridgerator. It was quite a day!
Did you really mean Nineteen-Eighty-Eight?
In PC Magazine from July 1988 there is an advert for a 15MHz XT for $575 with an optional 30MB Segate ST238 5.25" scsi hard drive inside for an extra $295 [0]
The price hasn't dropped much since, it's now $206 for the drive [1]
[0] https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-07-01/page/22/mode/2...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/ST238R-Seagate-3600RPM-Internal-Drive...
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#19Plan 9 implemented this concept in the worm cached file server, one of the on-disk file systems used in plan 9. The idea was you have a disk based cache and a WORM (write once, read many) dump consisting of optical juke boxes. Writes to the fs are stored in the cache until the fs is dumped to worm, manually or on a schedule (hard-coded to do this 2am every night.) http://man.9front.org/4/cwfs
The idea was to reduce the cost of storage by removing long term data from costly hard disks and storing it on cheap magneto-optical disks which like CD's could be stored in an automated juke box. Write all the data you want to the cache, then commit to worm. As the worm fills, you just buy another disk and put it in the jukebox. The history(1) command then gives you a files history as a set of paths you can bind over another path to use an old version of a file instead of copying it. Its really a file system for programmers. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/fs/
This idea was expanded on with Venti/Fossil which allows you to build file systems from arbitrary venti data sets. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/
Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)
#20If mass storage were free, then everything would be append-only by default. There would be no excuse to not do this. A major benefit of append-only is that your writes are always ideal for whatever storage medium. Especially magnetic or tape. Combine append-only with batching of transactions (i.e. across 1-10 milliseconds at a time), and you can write multiple txns per disk I/O operation (assuming txn size < storage…
what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage
Then you would delete it
> everything would be append-only by default
doesn't mean everything is permanently etched into stone or written on the blockchain, it just means that "by default" everything you write is written to a new block[1], instead of having to free up old blocks to reuse and keep track of which blocks of storage are available
[1]"block" is just meant as a generic unit of storage, I'm not trying to say anything about actual drive blocks and implementation details