Researcher Records His Life On Computer
Gordon Bell Has Digitized 50,000 Family Photos, Saved 100,000 E-mails, And Records His Days
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Every Step You Take, On Record
Meet Gordon Bell, a man who decided he needed more memory to remember everything about his life - so he started saving his whole life on a computer. John Blackstone has the story.
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A Stitch In Time, Recorded
Only On The Web: Gordon Bell is a 71-year-old researcher for Microsoft who is saving his entire life on a computer. John Blackstone gets a first-hand look.
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Gordon Bell says memories make life richer, so he's recording everything that happens in his life on computer. (CBS)
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The Memory Project
CBS' Steve Hartman and crew learn the true worth of picture.
He wears a little camera around his neck that takes a picture every 30 seconds or so. A sound recorder rolls non-stop.
At 71, Bell's own memory is still good. But he's now saving his whole life on computer, from childhood certificates to all his medical records. Memories make life richer, he says.
"I can retrieve everything I ever heard, seen or done forever," Bell says.
He has digitized 50,000 family photos. He hasn't deleted an e-mail in five years. "I have 100,000 e-mails," he says.
"There's at thing about this system that having everything is so ... important," Bell explains.
The system he's working on for Microsoft would help people easily record and recall their entire past. "Our focus is to try to make it as useful as possible," Bell says.
Using computers to remember, Bell says, will free our minds for more creative thinking.
Why use your own brain for storage, he figures, when computer memory has become so cheap. Fifteen years ago, a gigabyte of memory cost $1,000. Today, it costs less than $1.
One gigabyte can hold the content of 1,000 novels. He says he would tell young people to "absolutely" never throw anything away.
If Gordon Bell and his research team are successful, we may one day have instant recall of everything without actually having to remember anything. Consider that next time you're about to hit the "delete" button.
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I would like to order 20 gigabytes of that memory. The above is incorrect. What costs $1/gigabyte is hard drive storage not memory.