The Computer Data Bank: will it kill your freedom? (1968)

Tech marches on:<p><i>5,000-word dossier for each of 200 million Americans on a single, 4,800-foot reel of one-inch plastic computer tape. It would take no longer than four minutes to find an individual file, and a print-out would follow in moments.</i><p>Interesting to hear when a 4 minute seek time on an index would have been considered short, on a data set which was merely 8 terabytes or so. By comparison, that wouldn't hold all the photos uploaded to Flickr. Yesterday.

Depressingly accurate.

I found it interesting that writers in the 60s saw that computers and software (database or data banks) were like the early 20th century railroads and telephone companies. I somehow thought that modern similar views such as by Eben Moglen (steel = software) <a href="http://www.geof.net/blog/2006/12/10/eben-moglen" rel="nofollow">http://www.geof.net/blog/2006/12/10/eben-moglen</a> were new. Interesting nevertheless.