I'd love to have a tape drive too.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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Fuck AI
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Long term storage for masses of cold data seems like it would be useful for when it rarely needs to be retrieved - my mind goes to user data like location and search terms for later use by law enforcement (but I am paranoid and all out of tinfoil). What innocuous real world uses would this data in this format be used eternal but infrequent recall?
Backups. Tape is still the cheapest and most resilient option for long term storage. Considering how expensive hard drives are now, changing your backup strategy to use tape instead could save hundreds of millions vs buying the equivalent amount in hard drive storage. Add the AI cybersecurity threats, plus the likelihood of regional turmoil and data centers being targeted in warfare, and how valuable pre-AI data is, I imagine there's a desire to replicate existing backups for redundancy, and keep more of it in air-gapped cold storage.
I imagine audit trails for legal purposes (both business operations, and LLM processes), storing the original data used for creating LLM training sets in case they need to go back and redo them differently, and the usual data backups.
Next up: magnetic core memory and delay line memory make a triumphant return.
Damn - I was looking forward to lugging around stacks of punch cards.
Say what you will, punch cards I have left from the 60's are still readable (or rather, they would be if I built a reader for them). That's more than can be said of any floppy disk, ZIP drive or CDROM of any denomination from even 20 years later.
And guess what: core memories that have been left unpowered for decades are still readable to this day too. The guys on the Curious Marc Youtube channel have demonstrated reading back old Apollo program cores and recovering the software that ran on them several times.
Old tech is old and clunky, but it'll still be functional long after the AI crap gets media-obsoleted out of existence. That's not to say I'm glad it's coming back though - particularly when the comeback is prompted by tech-bro-induced scarcity.
Yeah, I definitely miss the days when things were built to last. And last. And...