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i'm still waiting for holographic drives(storage)... remember that?

Getting close, Check this out

Fancy a Million-Gigabtye Hard Drive?
May 11th, 2006 | Posted in Misc Portable Technology by Leon Huang | Source

HDD, Storage, Computer, Tech, Technology

Researchers have finally found a way to create storage devices that are capable of storing millions of gigabytes of data. With the use of ferroelectric, the researchers from Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania are able to squeeze 12.8 million gigabytes of information into a cubic centimeter. Very amazing indeed.

Until recently, researchers were not able to find a method of stabilizing ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. It was this group of talented researchers that found out that water is in fact the answer to their problem. It has to do with the hydroxyl (OH) ions molecules found in water, which are capable of screening the charges.

Imagine the possibility of million-gigabyte hard drives. The amount of disk space might seem excessively generous, but I trust that when these drives become a reality, applications that truly leverage the obscene amount of space will start to sprout.

However, several researchers have suggested that significant challenges still lie ahead, such as methods of assembling the nanowires densely and efficiently reading and writing data to and from the nanowires.

Consider that the computer revolution is still in its infancy.

Remember how citizens of the 1820s made all that fuss over their steam engines and cotton gins? That was the infancy of the industrial revolution and yet people of the time marveled at the "modern" age they were living in some thought that either the human race had reached the limits of its potential or that the human race had gotten "too big for its britches" and was displeasing God.

I am old enough to remember when hand-held calculators were a big deal back in 1974. I was one of the first ones to take one into my 6th grade class and all the other kids (including my teacher) crowded around my desk to see this marvel for themselves. This calculator not only did the four basic math functions but it had a percentage and square root key as well. This was big stuff back then. My teacher had me input some "complicated" problems to try to fool it but it spit back the right answer, always. So long as the answer didn't consist of more than 8 digits. Also, this calculator had bright red LEDs and sucked up batteries faster than laptops do today.

Now flash forward about 20 years to the day I brought home my first home computer. This was only about 12 years ago. This computer costed nearly $3,000 and it sported 4MB of RAM, a 20MHz 486 processor and a whopping 129MB hard drive. It also had a 2400bps modem that I hooked up to Prodigy with (at $3.60 an hour). This was before most of us even knew what the Internet was.

This was only 12 years ago!

Today, I have many computers in the house including the one I am typing this out on. This computer has 2 gigabytes of RAM, two 300GB hard drives, a 3 gigahertz processor and a 21 inch LCD screen. With a Bose speaker system that would blow my 1993 era home stereo away. My entire record collection (some 1200 albums and 15,000 songs) takes up maybe a quarter of one of my two hard drives.

One can only guess what a typical computer of 12 years from now will be like. I'm guessing that storage space will be measured in terrabytes and it will be possible to store pretty much every book and piece of music ever written for starters.