Posted on 09/24/2012 4:24:00 AM PDT by fella
Hmmm....I was thinking along the lines of ‘Babylon 5’ data crystals coming into existence.
I am increasingly becoming convinced that archaeologists, when confronted with something whose purpose is non-obvious, simply make something up. Typically, they say it was an object used in religious ceremonies. So ironically, if they find an archive of posts from godless DU, they will claim that these glass slivers with strange dots on them appear to be religious artifacts.
You would generally use it for things that you wanted to keep around for a long time: corporate data, music archives, video archives. For individual people, this would be a medium to transfer video recordings of their children growing up, family pictures, stuff you want to be able to pass on to your grandchildren.
darn...and I thought the 64G USB memory thingy I bought yesterday was cool....
I've been trying to forget this Sliver.
“Open the pod bay doors Hal” will become “open the family photo album hal”.
This concept was first proposed as a memory method at least 20 years ago. Finally glass memory storage may be coming to fruition, it appears.
This is only proof of concept stuff, I suspect. It is likely that it won’t be long before this is able to be many more than four layers of data, and that data can be much more compressed than 10Mb/sq.in/layer, if the history of the advance of technology is followed.
Nevertheless, the most important part of this announcement is the longevity and permanence of this data storage device.
But that's as much as 5 Thumbdrives!
OK, so the data will last for centuries - how about the devices to ‘read’ that data?
Thanks BenLurkin. The problem is, picking it up without cutting yourself.
You misread. It has the information density of a CD, not the thickness of a CD.
Actually, thirty years ago, the guys in the lab next door to mine at the research center in El Segundo, CA, an offshoot of Xerox’s PARC, Dr. P. McQ. and his assistant, Bob, were working on glass memory with micro lasers just before PARC closed the entire lab and laid us all off.
This is sweeeet! They never should have closed that lab down, but it was political. The director of the Advanced Development Lab made someone among the PTB at PARC really angry about something, and that was that.
We could have skipped a whole lot of media-storage steps if they hadn’t made that corrupt decision in 1982, which is ahead in the running for the worst year of my life.
No I didn’t. The article refers to data density (which isn’t that great actually if no better than a cd) and thickness. The thickness is actually a little higher than a cd, at .08 inches for this glass vs about .05 inches for a cd.
The mistake I made was a thinking a cd was about 2mm thick when it’s thinner.
Yes. I kind of low-balled it when I estimated when I first heard discussions of glass structures used for computer memory. I am not surprised to hear that PaloAlto was involved in such research. It is rather surprising for me to hear that you were involved in some way with that research!
Oh, I thought I told you a while ago that I was an RA-5 at a PARC division. I didn’t work on the glass memory; the guys in the lab next door to mine did, and they were pretty excited about it at the time and explained it to me.
I used to go in their lab to use the SEM and a few other pieces of their equipment. My lab was electroplating and photolithography, too fumy and chemically to house their sensitive equipment.
I was working on the resistor/capacitor electrographic writing head for Xerox machines at the time. I completed the first prototype before they closed the division. It worked, too!
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