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Back in 1860, some of our grandparents may have written a message on onionskin paper and paid $5 an ounce to have it carried by Pony Express over a 10-day, 2,000-mile route from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Our parents probably wrote letters that took one to two weeks to deliver, and they would rarely call long distance because of the cost. Now, most of us take for granted long-distance calls and fax machines.
In each case, our ancestors could not imagine their descendants moving significantly more data at significantly faster rates. By the same token, most of us today cannot envision the speed at which data will move in the near future.
VAST AMOUNTS OF DATA
We grew up thinking in terms of characters. If you wanted to delete a file on the computer, you typed the proper words on the command line. The new way to delete a file is to use a mouse to click and hold on a picture of the file and drag it to the picture of the wastebasket--the computer does the rest. But vast amounts of data, in the form of pixels, are required for each picture.
Multi-media systems available today marry text, sound, data, graphics, and moving pictures into one system. Working with this type of data requires transferring and storing much larger amounts of data than ever before....