The Archivists

How exactly did those in the Encyclopedia Foundation preserve data? Information would seem to be scanty, but there are some clues. But they would tend to indicate that it was a massive and enormous undertaking.

Consider the book “Foundation’s Edge” set almost 500 years after the Encyclopedia Foundation was up and running. It is now the Foundation Federation, and spans one third of the Galaxy, with influence strong in another third of it. Its technology is higher than it’s ever been, higher – we are told – than the former Galactic Empire at its height.

Enter Janov Pelorat, a scholar of an arcane field, but noted in that field nonetheless. Born and raised on Terminus, and has never left it. He has spent his entire life on the planet that is completely dedicated to learning – with the implications that this is where they have the most need for stored data of past discoveries to build off of.

We don’t even need that implication, it was referenced in earlier books that the Encyclopedia Foundation did fulfill their goal and that the Encyclopedia Galactica is a reality. And continuously updated.

But when Golan Trevize asks Janov Pelorat if he is ready to board the ship, Janov says that he is now, because he has managed to fit all of his data – about Earth and the myths surrounding it – on to “one wafer”. One wafer? One wafer!

And this wafer, is it a thumbnail sized disc? No, it is described as being 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters, which for those raised in America is about 8 inches per side. Or substantially bigger than your iphone, but smaller – a bit – than your laptop. But it was just for storage, and still needed a computer to fit into.

And on that enormous – by our standards – wafer, he did not have the collected knowledge of mankind, but only one small topic. Earth. You yourself could download all there was to know about Earth – far more than Janov knew – and store it in a medium the size of your thumb. With room for three other subjects just as vast. And any encyclopedia set you liked!

Yet this is the time when we are told that there have been rapid advances in computer technology throughout the Foundation Federation. So we can only assume that things were much worse 500 years earlier. But how much worse?

Well, we know that when Hari Seldon was talking to Gaal Dornick in the first book, that they used a calculator such as we had in the nineteen seventies. Handheld, only did math, a smidge bigger than you iphone, and definitely thicker. Clearly, the Foundation’s technological advances have not been focused on computer technology! Back in those days, if their data storage was on a par with ours of the seventies, then they were still thinking that punch cards were the latest. IBM had punch cards that could store 64 bytes of data.

Today, in 2011, we can store 256 Giga Bytes of information on a USB Flash Drive. It weighs about an ounce, and is the size of your thumb. This is one billion bytes, as opposed to 64 bytes. It would take 15 million 625 thousand punch cards to hold one billion bytes.

Clearly, the Foundation Federation was substantially lacking in computer scientists, and perhaps the Galactic Empire itself had forgotten this entire field tens of thousands of years back. It apparently not only needed to be re-discovered, but it developed at what – to us – would seem a glacial pace. In fairness, they were busy rebuilding nuclear power plants, and miniaturizing power sources, and they were far in excess of us in that.

But how then was all the information in the Galactic Library on Trantor transferred to Terminus? The answer, implied in the books, is that it was not. After all, the first place Janov Pelorat wants to go to is Trantor, to check out the remains of the Library – wait, what?

Think about that! Janov is on the one planet in the Galaxy in which one would expect ALL the knowledge of mankind to be! The Encyclopedia Foundation itself is right there! But he must go to Trantor, the very place the first Encyclopedists came from, to see what else they have?

This is yet another clue that their data storage technology was severely lacking. Apparently they were not able to take all the data from Trantor, even on billions of punch cards! They thus took what they could, and did a lot of starting from scratch – which apparently Hari Seldon kind of wanted them to do.

What storage mediums did they end up using? Apparently electronic books in which one would plug in the appropriate “cassette”, which for those under the age of 40, was something about the size of a cell phone, which had a magnetized tape on it, from which information could be recovered. Principally sounds, as in music, but it served as data storage for us once, too.

Well, you can fit about 1,320,000 bytes on a cassette tape, depending on various factors. That still works out to a lot of tapes to be stored, and transported. One wonders why the Encyclopedia Foundation – with its love of miniaturization – would not have worked on micro-miniaturizing the print on regular metal or plastic discs?