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“If you typed at a speed of fifty words a minute with eight characters in a word for forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year (no holidays off, but you get a vacation) from age 20 to age 65, you would generate approximately two gigabytes of text and be in a terrible mood. Ten years ago 80 megabytes was a reasonable size for a hard drive. Now there are floppies that exceed a gigabyte and hard drives that exceed 20. Larger and larger drives seem to be announced every month. Macs now have a 100 gigabyte capability. This is a world where storage capacity increases faster than people can type. Boswell is not worried; you should not be either.

“And if you have all that capacity, why bother to throw anything away? If you do discard it, you know the chances are that you will soon be searching for it. If you have ever dutifully cleaned out a closet or a garage, chances are you threw out something you needed just a few weeks later. It seems to be a law of nature.

“Bytes, after all, hardly take up physical space or weigh anything: today’s ten gigabyte drive is smaller and lighter than the twenty megabyte drive of ten years ago.

“As for not being able to change archived material, who needs to change their old e-mail? What percentage of the text files now on your hard drive do you ever expect to change? And of those, how many are you completely uninterested in having a previous version of? Be honest -- there are very, very few. Certainly not enough to overwhelm your hard drive.

“Technology has given you the ability to be a data glutton to an extent undreamed of by the great minds of human history. Why not put your feet up and enjoy it?”

Charles Moore Reviews Boswell: A Comprehensive Environment To Store And Retrieve Your Data

Appendix 1: Boswell Glossary

Appendix 2: Boswell Use Suggestions

Charles W. Moore

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