Books seem to have enjoyed a quiet resurgence lately. No, really. After paper-based communication had been pronounced dead, more books were published than ever before. Ironically, books on programming, security and web design, despite the major slump that followed the post-2000 downturn, seem to be more successful than ever.

There was a time when the concept of computer science seemed a contradiction in terms and memory was firmly anchored inside human crania. Today, memory is one of the terms we surrender quite happily to our silicon avatars, even though life, intelligence and creativity are traits we're less happy to sacrifice. Yet, whenever a computer, database or network are asked to recall a particular file and present it to us, we are astonished that recall is less than instant.