Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1102/

PHP 8 makes it possible to rescue the princess but your 83 legacy princesses are all still PHP 5.

I hope somebody has a better answer for you but I think it’s just that the world has decided that one has to use two hands to operate a Smartphone now. I’d love a phone with a 5" screen but it looks like we are a (vocal) minority that’s not profitable to serve?

NT Cassettes were about the size of a full size SD card and maybe twice as thick and that was in 1992. Imagine what 31 years of research could have done to that technology!

You could probably carry some apps on individual tapes with you? If it was all miniaturized enough and we can cache some things. Digital photos and videos would work too as that obviously has been done many years ago.

Do we really need our modern data storage for mobile phones? Mobile phones for sure would be very very different than our modern smart phones but mobile phone networks don’t sound impossible. Of course the internet would have to work very differently too, but maybe routing and forwarding could be done just with everything from RAM?

That’s of course true, i was just wondering how far we could push it.

I’m incredibly unqualified to even think about how one might get faster random access times but i was imagining sci-fi solutions like looped tape so that you are always at most 1/2 of the tape length away from the point you want to reach, or the tape equivalent of multi actuator hard drives where there’s be multiple independent tapes in one cassette in a sort of RAID style thing but maybe instead of (only) striping data could be stored on multiple tapes in different places to always have one tape that is at a position close to the data you want. Or a system where the same tape has multiple read heads applied to it in distant places.

I’m aware of the enterprise backup solutions as mentioned in the main post. Still 45 TB are very impressive. But I was just wondering how diverse and powerful tape could be if it was the only viable storage solution. I’m assuming high speed rewinding and seeking and miniaturization would be something that the industry would have put a lot of effort into in that case, but for backup solutions those properties are less important.