On the Cloud and Moving Pictures
The Oracle has read 28 documents on this subject, the most recent dated 30 September 1996.
Questions put to the Oracle
Q Where do my documents live when they are not with me?
On a floppy disk, in a box, beside the machine. Where else would they live? A document is an object and objects are somewhere.
There is talk of network computers that keep your documents on a distant machine and fetch them down the wire as you need them. The Oracle can see the appeal and one difficulty: you would be unable to open your own work whenever the line was busy, which is most of the evening. Keep a second floppy. The Oracle has never regretted advising a second floppy.
Q Could I watch a moving picture down a telephone line?
Let us do the arithmetic together, since nobody selling you this idea will. A modem carries 28,800 bits in a second. One frame of television, uncompressed, is some 800 kilobytes. Television runs at 25 frames a second.
You would therefore wait rather more than an hour and a half for each second of film. A feature would arrive in eleven months. The Oracle allows that lines will quicken — perhaps twice as fast by 2005 — and observes that twice nothing is nothing.
Q Should I let another company hold my files?
No, and the Oracle is firmer on this than on anything else it has been asked. A company that holds your files holds you. It may be bought. It may fail. It may simply decide one morning that the terms have changed and that you agreed to this in advance.
The Oracle has read four thousand and ninety-six documents and not one of them says what becomes of a person’s correspondence when the company keeping it is sold. Keep the original. Keep it where you can put your hand on it.