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The Challenge
Despite the massive change in information storage and retrieval technology over time, our capacity to understand and synthesize information has remained constant. Beth Clough, a student of library science at the University of Maryland, offers this very instructive historical overview of information storage and retrieval:
| 3000 B.C. | Clay tablets | 1 character/1 cubic inch (cci) |
| 1450 A.D. | Printed page | 500 cci |
| 1990s | Optical disk | 125,000,000,000 cci |
Computation
| 5000 B.C. | Abacus | 2-4 instructions per second (ips) |
| 1945 A.D. | Computer | 110 ips |
| 1960 | Computer | 100,000 ips |
| 1970s | Computer | 1,000,000 ips |
| 1980s | Computer | 10,000,000 ips |
| 1990s | Computer | 1,000,000,000 ips |
Transmission of Information
| 4000 B.C. | Messenger | .01 words per minute (wpm) |
| 1844 A.D. | Telegraph | 50-60 wpm |
| 1980s | Cable/fiber | 1,000,000,000 wpm |
| 1990s | Fiber | 100,000,000,000 wpm |
Human Information Processing
Written Language
| 4000 B.C. | 300 wpm |
| Today | 300 wpm |
Visual Images
| 4000 B.C. | 100,000,000 bits per glance |
| Today | 100,000,000 bits per glance |
Spoken Languages
| 4000 B.C. | 120 wpm |
| Today | 120 wpm |
From an email message from Beth Clough to the Bibliographic Instruction Discussion Group, 10 Jan 1995, accessed 8 Jan 2013 from http://www.agmb.de/medibib-l/1995/0011.html.