In the end this may be more important than anything else in the evolution of technology: information is growing very, very fast. The BBC quotes a study by the University of California, Berkeley that:- every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet;
- information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999;
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The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in the same period;
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the amount of information generated has grown about 30%;
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in 2002 alone about five exabytes (an exabyte, unless I’m much mistaken, is a billion gigabytes) of new information was generated by the world’s print, film, magnetic and optical storage systems.
And yet we still don’t have decent programs for letting us find stuff — words, pictures, sound — on our own computer. Why is that?