Storage South—Wa-a-a-ay South—of the Border - I/O with Mark & Hal - Column

Computer Technology Review, August, 2002 by Mark Ferelli, Hal Glatzer

Hal: I'd like to tell you an amusing story about storage.

Mark: You always have good stories to tell.

Hal: I know. But since my Storage Watch column was spiked, I haven't been able to share them with CTR's readers.

Mark: So, tell us your story. No. Wait. Let me guess: "It was a dark and stormy night...."

Hal: Actually, it was a dark and stormy day. A cold gale was blowing outside, as I was surfing the Net, three nautical miles off Cape Horn, in the Southern Ocean, out beyond the tip-end of South America.

Mark: How did you get onto the Internet from there?

Hal: Well, I was in the cozy warmth of an Internet cafe, and both the cafe and I were afloat in an ocean liner. My data bits were being beamed up through a satellite dish, and bounced off one of the geostationary telecommunication satellites, to earthbound dishes, routers, and landlines. The cafe itself was a concession, one of about 45, on various cruise lines, operated by Digital Seas International, of Miramar, Fla. On our ship--Holland America's Ryndam--the cafe had eight PCs networked to a server. The crew, by the way, had access to a similar setup below decks.

Mark: Exchanging email must be very popular, if you're away from home for months at a time.

Hal: It sure is.

Mark: Is it expensive?

Hal: It cost a lot more than an Internet cafe on land, but there was no other way to go online. Passengers could pay either fifty cents a minute, or $229.95 for unlimited access during the entire 17-day cruise, from Valparaiso, Chile, to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Mark: You took the all-you-can-eat option, right?

Hal: Of course. Now, this cafe was not only more expensive than land-based cafes: The workstations had only a proprietary browser, not Explorer or Netscape, and I took a--

Mark: There's a storage angle to this story, I hope.

Hal: Trust me, Mark. I can find a storage angle anywhere! As I was saying...I took a lot of digital pictures, because my wife and I had promised to send photos to friends and relatives, as we went along. But there was no way to send digital files of any kind through the cafe's workstations: no USB port, no PC Card slot, no solid-state card reader, and no telephone "dataport" for my laptop. The only storage devices suitable for file-sharing were on the server: a floppy drive and a CD-ROM reader.

Mark: Well, then, I can guess how you sent your pictures. Your laptop has a CD-burner; so you burned them onto CD-R disks, and--

Hal: I could have done that, it's true. But you have to "finalize" a CD-R before it can be read in any drive other than the one that recorded it. And I didn't bring enough blank CD-Rs, to be able to sacrifice one a day.

Mark: Okay. How'd you do it?

Hal: It was a great kluge--an amusingly complicated procedure. Follow me, now... The camera I was shooting with was a 10-year-old Canon, that stores its .JPGs in a PC Card Type II form-factor hard drive: a 270MB Calluna card. Taking the card out of the camera, and inserting it into my laptop's PC Card slot, I copied the picture files into my 16MB solid-state DiskOnKey. Then I pulled the DiskOnKey out of my laptop's USB port and inserted it into the USB port on my wife's laptop, which has a floppy drive. Then I recorded the pictures onto a floppy and took the disk to the cafe.

Mark: Why didn't you just use your wife's laptop all along?

Hal: Because mine's the only one with photo-processing software.

Mark: Okay. But you said you took a lot of pictures. Floppies hold only 1.44 MB.

Hal: Ahh, but this was an old camera, remember? Its highest resolution was 640x480 pixels. Each photo consumed only about 130KB, so the floppy could hold up to 10 pictures. And that was more than enough. You don't want to make people wait and wait while a million pictures download. And, of course, I needed only one floppy disk, because I could record over it, the next day.

Mark: So the charmingly old-fashioned floppy--archaic as it seems, today--was really the right storage device for this application.

Hal: Yes. And what's funny is: The first time I went through this procedure, it was sobering to realize that I could not remember the last time I'd used a floppy!

Mark: Well, maybe our readers have stories like that to share, too.

Hal: May be they do. If you've found a "new" application for an "old" storage device, let us know. Email us. Either me, at hal_glatzer@wwpi.com.

Mark: Or me, at mark ferelli@wwpi.com.