Crash Insurance

My computer is about a thousand times faster than the one I first used in the 1970s. But it doesn’t feel particularly fast. I still spend time waiting for it to do things, especially start up or shut down or do anything involving a PDF file. The programs I use all day run at what seems a normal, not an astonishing, speed.

What does astonish me is how much data today’s computers can handle—which is where a lot of the new computing power has gone. They can create, transmit, format, and index extremely large files, and they can store practically anything. Every digital picture I have ever taken, every message or Web clip I might conceivably want to see again, every version of every document I have ever created—these all fit on my 100-gigabyte laptop hard drive, with room to spare. But the endlessly increasing data we see ...