Andrew Orlowski overstates the case a little. Storage is not the new chips.

But the humble hard drive, the spinning aluminum platter called a "Winchester" by some of us old-timers, now dominates the storage scene. And the father of that technology was Al Shugart.

This era is Shugart's Revenge. (Buy his new book here.)

This is something of a surprise to some futurists. After all, optical storage is really cool. Imagine getting a half-gig, or several gig, or dozens of gig on the same CD form factor, and usually backward-compatible at that?

What was unexpected with hard drives was that they would become hardened and mobile. We were used to thinking of them as being fairly unwieldy and fragile, hidden away on our desktops, requiring that we treat our laptops like human newborns.

But they did become sturdy, and tiny, and thus mobile. Now they can go anywhere you go. And in the case of some products, like the iPod, they literally define the category (although you can also make an iPod with flash memory).

There's one other point to make about this golden age of storage.

That is, it's dependent on media for its message.

I keep waiting for people to deliver their own cool, new, high-storage content with the new tools we've created the last decade. Instead we're mainly making new, bigger or smaller copies of the same old stuff -- movies, TV shows, music.

To the degree that the media industry has cooperated with this (even tacitly) it profits. CD sales are up mainly because more people buy them to load into hard drives. (Used CD stores are hot because people often just sell the CDs back into the after-market.)

To the degree the media industry demands payment for every movement of a file across a drive, it suffers. We bypass it, and they lose respect with every lawsuit they file.

The copyright wars are Al Shugart's real revenge.