80 Years of a Magazine on a Hard Drive? It’s the Talk of the Town

By JOHN BIGGS
Published: September 28, 2006

If E. B. White and Joseph Mitchell had known that their essays would end up on metal platters spinning at 5,400 r.p.m., they would probably have asked for a bit more per word. Their writing — along with articles by hundreds of other contributors to The New Yorker — is now collected on one 3-by-5-inch portable hard drive.

The 80-gigabyte drive has Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s top-hatted symbol, engraved on the case. It connects to Macs or PC’s using a U.S.B. cable and contains 4,164 issues of The New Yorker, dating back to 1925. The drive has 20 gigabytes set aside for updates that will be available online.

The $299 device is available at www.thenewyorkerstore.com. Installation is simple: plug it in, allow it to install a special reader on your computer and then search or browse issues by author, date or content. Each article appears just as it did in decades past, and the archive includes all the advertisements, cover art and, of course, the cartoons.

You can even personalize your drive with two lines of text, creating an heirloom to be passed on from cyborg to cyborg, far into the future.