Magnetic Revolutions

The portion of Mechanisms I’m working on right now deals with magnetic storage media, and particularly hard drives. They’re fascinating machines: the platters inside the computer you’re using to read this are spinning at about 10,000 revolutions per minute, while the drive’s read/write heads float by a bare fraction of the width of a human hair above. If, as sometimes happens, the two should touch, the iron oxide surface of the disk will be scorched by the contact, like the path gouged by a meteorite plowing across a desert expanse. It is striking to me that the portion of the computer used to “save” our data is the portion most self-evidently an inscription technology, with strong roots in the kinds of machinic genealogies established by Kittler and others.

Some may object that a focus on hard drives, the most overtly mechanical portion of the computer, is arbitrary, even tendentious. Hard drives, after all, are a relatively recent innovation—the personal computer era was well underway without them, though the technology has actually been around since the fifties. They are also, of course, by no means the only storage media in everyday use today, and there is increasing evidence that they will be surpassed, not only by solid state or laser optical devices, but also by more advanced techniques such as holography. Nonetheless, magnetic storage devices have been the preeminent storage media for personal computers since the mid-eighties, and also for countless Web servers, and as such are historically central to any narrative of computing and inscription.

I vividly remember my own first experience with a hard drive. I had grown up using an Apple IIe, and was accustomed to swapping 5.25-inch disks in and out of my system’s two external floppy drives whenever I wanted to use an application or save my data. The first time I saved a file to a hard drive (on an IBM at school) was a very different kind of experience: my data was somehow “in” the computer, and not simply recorded on external media. Though I couldn’t have put it in these terms at the time, it felt as though the von Neumann architecture had been overturned, or at least jostled: the computer was not just a calculating engine sandwiched in between input and output devices, but something more like an archival entity, with its own internal memory. The machine’s individual identity was suddenly coterminous with the data it “contained.” Of course from an architectural standpoint nothing had really changed, and my computer still conformed very much to the classic von Neumann model. The storage device had simply retreated within the case. But the psychological impact of saving data “inside” the machine itself, rather than to some external locale, cannot overlooked, and is, I believe, in its own way, as significant as the advent of the GUI, the more commonly celebrated revolution.