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Gateway (Heechee Saga, #1)
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2017 Reads > GW: The Futuristic Technology of the 70s

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Nick Halase (nickhalase) | 1 comments I'm only on chapter 6, but I'm absolutely loving how audio is kept on "tape" recordings. It's so crazy to me to imagine a future where cassette tapes made their way into the space age and are utilized by artificial intelligence programs. Are there any other future-isms I should keep an eye out for in this book?


Trike | 11294 comments This is known as "zeerust", the quaint retrofuturism of outdated technology originally meant to be superscience gee-whiz high tech, a word coined by Douglas Adams.

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message 3: by Rob, Roberator (new) - rated it 4 stars

Rob (robzak) | 7207 comments Mod
I will say that important computer data is still stored on tape backups because they don't know/trust the long term storage retention of more modern storage mediums.


Iain Bertram (iain_bertram) | 1740 comments Rob wrote: "I will say that important computer data is still stored on tape backups because they don't know/trust the long term storage retention of more modern storage mediums."

You still get bit rot, over time the datasets I access (in the Petabyte scale) slowly disappear (OK very slowly). You need to copy the tapes over every now again.

You have to have multiple copies on disc in multiple locations (and imagine the bandwidth of a container load of TB tapes).


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