Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if mass storage were free? (1980)

dl.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#31

Post by itsmartapuntocm »

cperciva wrote: post #4
082349872349872 wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

More recently, movie studios regularly destroyed old film to make space for new ones, causing old pictures, especially silent era ones, to be lost forever.

Even NASA wiped the original Apollo 11 tapes to reuse them.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#32

Post by ezekiel68 »

WalterBright wrote: post #25
anamexis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Double-entry bookkeeping was a great advance.

And -- in keeping with the flow of this thread -- a complete luxury until the implements (paper/pens/tape/disk/silicon) would become abundant and ubiquitous.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#33

Post by spelunker »

oakwhiz wrote: post #5
dwenzek wrote: post #2

I 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…

A non-deletion strategy should consider including an encryption and key management strategy to enable retroactive secure deletion without impacting availability, reliability, and performance. This seems to be missing from a lot of systems that deal with personal information.

also called crypto shredding! We had this issue trying to square GDPR-type things with an append-only store.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#34

Post by usrusr »

Reminds me of the various "what if all memory was non-volatile" that made the rounds when Intel Optane entered the stage. A bit like the inverse of this, but the caveats might turn out similar: in one case you'd still want a well-defined resettable area, in the other case you'd still want to avoid having to deal with arbitrarily long addresses which would at some point become as bad as seek times even if hypothetically seek times in the stricter sense did not exist.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#35

Post by berkut »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #13
Hooray_Darakian wrote: post #9

> 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!

I suspect that was really 1 GB?

3.5" HDs of over > 20 MB for IBM PCs were around in IBM PCs at the time.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#36

Post by mouse_ »

dwenzek wrote: post #2

I 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…

I'm fairly certain data and records have been sewn into tapestries for thousands of years.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#37

Post by DrSAR »

bob1029 wrote: post #12

If 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…

Isn't information retrieval potentially more costly if you have to search over a larger sea of useless blocks. Certainly is the case in my garage+house where I can now store way more than I ever could in previous stages of my life.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#38

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #13
Hooray_Darakian wrote: post #9

> 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!

OK, so I think memory was wrong on this. I found this online:

> In the 1980's we used 14 inch drives in our DEC VAX cluster. Each 14 inch drive had a capacity of about 450MB

Those platters were definitely the 14" size, and there was more than one of them in the refridgerator-sized unit. At this temporal distance, I can't guess what the overall size was anymore, but it was clearly not 1MB.

Sorry for the misleading post. Still, it was quite a day, regardless.

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#39

Post by pinewurst »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #38
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

OK, so I think memory was wrong on this. I found this online: > In the 1980's we used 14 inch drives in our DEC VAX cluster. Each 14 inch drive had a capacity of about 450MB Those platters were definitely the 14" size, and there was more than one of them in the refridgerator-sized unit. At this temporal distance, I can't guess what the overall size was anymore, but it was clearly not 1MB. Sorry for the misleading pos…

https://gunkies.org/wiki/RA81_disk_drive

Re: What if mass storage were free? (1980)

#40

Post by WalterBright »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #32
WalterBright wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double-entry bookkeeping was a great advance.

And -- in keeping with the flow of this thread -- a complete luxury until the implements (paper/pens/tape/disk/silicon) would become abundant and ubiquitous.

Paper and ink were good enough for centuries.
Post reply on HN