Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Thesis 60

The necessary storage capacity already exists.

It's easy to infer that a panoply of ubiquitous systems running at all times—systems whose operation by definition precedes users, as we've noted—is going to churn up enormous quantities of data. How and where is all this information going to be stored? Will the issue of storage itself present any obstacle to the real-world deployment of everyware?

We can derive a useful answer by, again, extrapolating not from the best currently available systems, but from those at the middle of the pack. The iPod shuffle I wear when I go running, for example, is a circa-2004 solid-state storage device, ...