Hard drives crash, flash drives get lost or get run through the washing machine – all sorts of bad things can happen to your data. You can still have that kind of accident today I accidentally left a CD on top of a printer and, after running off a few pages, discovered that my CD was now blank. Back in the day, you could accidentally erase a floppy disk just by setting a telephone receiver on top of it the magnet in the receiver would wipe out the electronic data on the disk by rearranging the pattern of electrons on the disk’s mylar surface. An eBook, a graphics file of an antique map, a chess database, all can be lost through various mishaps. In the case of digital data the drawback lies in the magnetic nature of the medium. All of that data is fully searchable and that search requires just the tiniest fraction of the time it would take to find the same information stored in endless bookshelves of a paper format.īut with every form of technology, there’s always a drawback. Assuming that a typical print volume of chess games (such as Chess Informant) contains about a thousand games, that’s the equivalent of more than 4,000 printed books – quite literally a complete chess library on a single DVD. I do much the same thing in my chess work (both technical and historical) both of the 2011 editions of ChessBase’s master database (the unannotated Big Database and the annotated Mega Database) contain more than four million games from throughout chess history.
In my work as a historian I carry literally a complete library around with me on my laptop: scores of period books, newspapers, maps, and military manuals from the nineteenth century. The availability and portability of digital data are wonderful aspects of modern life.
0 kommentar(er)
