Tape

The magnetic tape, once a mainstay of our lives, now a dead medium. Replaced by the similar but more rigid spinning platters of our hard drives or the temporarily frozen transistor patterns of our phones flash memory. At least, dead in the common eye, but useful technologies almost never die. They simply fade away into the limbo existence of their fringe uses. There is a small DC power grid still operating inside San Francisco, powering a network of ancient, economically irreplaceable elevators. Out there in the wilds of legacy systems there is still FORTRAN code controlling perhaps vital systems. And while consumers may have left the tape to die data archivists have kept it alive. Where data is needed forever, in a business sense, there is nothing that can compete with tape in longevity. Tape libraries holding petabytes of information in drum upon drum of magnetic tape exist in server rooms across the world. And how long will they last? Just what is forever, in a business sense? About 30 years. They hope. So what will become in the decades to come of all this data we have been studiously collecting, trusting in the messianic power of the Big Data revolution to solve all our problems if only we can offer to it sufficient amounts of what it craves. What will happen to it when even the tapes begin to erode? Well, the answer is simple. That's tomorrow's problem.