The internet cloud, the Petabyte Age and Bell’s Law

November 12, 2006 Wired Magazine was there at the origin of the internet magazine species. Seed-funded by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, it gave us the world’s first banner advert and continues to give and give. One of its primary drawcards is George Gilder whose columns are always worth reading, and if you’re looking towards the future from the point of view of an investor, the Gilder Technology Report is even more worthwhile. This month he writes a particularly insightful piece about “the dawning of the petabyte age”, and the coming of “the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data.” An excerpt: “Moore's law has a corollary that bears the name of Gordon Bell, the legendary engineer behind Digital Equipment's VAX line of advanced computers and now a principal researcher at Microsoft. According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?” Via Slashdot

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