> Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever before. Other features of optical discs include improved reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is argued that optical discs fit the requirements of database systems better than magnetic discs and tapes.

Wild view from where we sit today, but CDs were ~700MB in 1982. Seagate launched a 5MB hard drive in 1980 so.... not entirely absurd to think that `just don't delete things` could be the way of the future. We sorta adopted `just don't delete things` anyway though not with respect to RDBMS systems.

Thanks for sharing!