Over 4000 issues on a hard disk drive archive

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Dave Winer in his post[Complete New Yorker archive on a hard disk] talks about this new offering from Pexagon. According to [J&R website]:

Over 4,000 issues of your favorite magazine now sit, ready for you to search and savor, on an 80GB incredibly lightweight and travel-friendly drive. This high-performance, brushed-aluminum Hard Drive measures only 3x5-inch and can easily fit inside a purse or briefcase so show it off to your tech-savvy friends and co-workers. Plus, there is plenty of extra room on the drive for future updates. Simply install The Complete New Yorker Program (installation CD provided), then connect the drive to a USB port on your Computer and have instant access to every article, poem, short story, and cartoon including every advertisement that has appeared in the magazine since 1925.

System Requirements: Windows 2000 or XP, Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, USB 2.0 port, CD-ROM drive, 750 MB of free hard drive space, 1024 x 768 minimum screen Resolution

The 750MB of disk space required on your system probably contains the indexing/metadata search system to find articles by subject, title or author. Linux is not listed, and if 750MB of disk space are required to run the program, then perhaps this system won't work with Linux at all.

The system claims that there is extra room on the disk to ingest future issues of the magazine. I wonder why they didn't put the indexing/metadata search software on the drive itself, so that it would be self-contained, rather than having a separate installation CD.

I think this is a sign of our times. The New Yorker magazine has taken the archives that they keep anyways, and made them available in bulk, in a handy disk drive delivery system. I know several people who keep boxes and boxes of back issues of all kinds of magazines, and this certainly is an improvement.

technorati tags: Dave Winer, New Yorker Magazine, archive, disk, drive, Windows, OS X, Linux, metadata, index, CD