Althouse: "When I met him, I was struck by a story he told about how he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container."

February 18, 2015

"When I met him, I was struck by a story he told about how he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container."

"He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds. He thought that meant something. He thought people needed to know that."

He = Brewster Kahle, the inventor of the Wayback Machine.

5 comments:

pm317 said...: I am in awe of the human mind, nothing artificial about it. Fuck artificial intelligence!; 2/18/15, 10:59 AM
Michael The Magnificent said...: http://www.internetlastpage.com/; 2/18/15, 11:04 AM
rehajm said...: Revisionists loathe The Wayback Machine.

Interestingly the New York Times has made numerous references to the Wayback Machine, it's function and it's purpose.; 2/18/15, 1:12 PM
MadisonMan said...: The Wayback machine is a great service. I marvel at how much disk space it must consume.; 2/18/15, 2:29 PM
Tibore said...: I hate to criticize either the article or Kahle, both of which are involved in something I very well appreciate (The Wayback Machine). But, that whole "fit the web in a conex box" statement just smacks of archaic thinking. The whole point of the internet itself, which includes the web, is that it's a virtual space, and therefore the space that technology housing it takes up is supposed to be irrelevant to the virtual "size" it has.

Physical dimensions do not define a gigabyte. They may define the hardware the gigabyte resides on, but just a few years ago that same set of dimensions represented just hundreds, and even just tens of megabytes. Take it back decades, and 3 to 5 times that space represented only single digit megabytes at best.

Virtual space is not defined by physical space any more than the size of a thought can be measured by the space that neurons take up. My own organization's server and storage space is many times the size of any shipping container out there, but it hardly houses anywhere near a significant percentage of the web. And a modern small business sized NAS can hold the totality of what the web was back in the mid 90's.

Physical size is separate from virtual size. And that's part of the point of the web: It abstracts physical dimensions for the storage and transmissibility of pure data.

Talking about how much space the servers and storage takes up is basically the equivalent of saying "How many horses would it take to get this satellite into space?" It may be mildly fascinating in a book-of-facts sort of way, but it's only so because we're still getting used to the technology.; 2/19/15, 8:29 AM