A Google Account (preferably with all 15GB of storage)."Also, the circuitry never really gets smaller, people just build bigger things with it." In other words, Moore's Law doesn't apply to Minecraft. "If I were to build a computer that was a million square miles, the game would pout and refuse to simulate it for me," he says. The only limit to how complex a system you can build in the game, he says, is that Minecraft won't render things that are too far away from your character within the game. Previously, Littley built a " factory farm" that automatically collects eggs from chickens-"It turned out more gruesome than I expected," he says-and a complex, rail-based messaging system akin to an email server.
This isn't the first time he has such a contraption in Minecraft. "My background gives me a basic understanding of the topic, but much of what I use to build these things is self taught." "My area of interest is nothing even closely related to hardware," he says. Littley is a computer science PhD student at University of Texas in Austin, but he says the project had nothing to do with his academic work, which is in distributed computing. Littley didn't build the drive to be practical. And the seek time-the amount of time it takes to find the data that you want to retrieve from the disk-is between six and seven minutes. Because of the difficulty in transferring a file from your hard drive in the game world of Minecraft, you'd actually have to manually enter each byte of data into the drive by hand. By stringing enough of them together, like a giant Rube Goldberg machine, he was able to scale it up into a data storage system.Īlthough you can quibble about the exact definition of a hard drive, as opposed to some other form of persistent storage, you've got to admit that it's impressive. Littley realized that because redstones can transmit through opaque blocks-but not transparent blocks-he could create a simple binary mechanism by building a system of virtual pistons to manipulate the blocks depending on a "1" or a "0" needs to be transmitted. The project depends largely on what's known in the game as "redstones," a type of block that transmits another in-game substance called "red stone dust."Įnterprising educators are already using Minecraft to teach programming, and Littley's endeavor provides a crash course the basic concepts that underpin our computer hardware.By using flows of this dust, players are able to build circuits and other complex machinery. He only used the standard tools available in the game, cobbling together his hard drive block by block. Littley says he built his hard drive without using any Minecraft add-ons-known as mods-or Minecraft editors that let players automate the creation of larger projects.
Enterprising educators are already using Minecraft to teach programming, and Littley's endeavor provides a crash course the basic concepts that underpin our computer hardware. They're a means of self-expression-and they're educational tools. "A surprisingly large number of commentators on Reddit think I should store 1KB of porn on it."īut the project also shows that virtual worlds like Minecraft-another staple of the modern computer universe-are far more than just games. "When I built the the device, I didn't have anything in mind that I wanted to store on it, I built it for the sake of the challenge," he says.
Littley built his hard drive just because he could. It's one of those projects that so sharply displays the wonderfully unique attitude that drives the world's computer hackers-a class of people that has come to play such an important role in our society. Littley built it himself, inside the virtual world of Minecraft. Cody Littley's new hard drive can only hold a single kilobyte of data-about one millionth of what you can cram onto those finger-nail-sized microSD cards-and it can't exactly slide into the back of your smartphone.