Rewritable Glass Memory That Stores Data for Eons Without Power

SciTechDaily ^ | 26 February 2025 | American Chemical Society

[ShadowAce]

Thanks to Red Badger for the ping!

[ShadowAce]

[Vermont Lt]

Well…isn’t this how Superman stored all of his knowledge from Krypton?

[Wuli]

And the material for glass is superabundent

[Nateman]

That was the same thing I was thinking! The crystals that had the information encoded in that Superman movie.

[TangoLimaSierra]

Just don’t drop it.

[Omnivore-Dan]

I’m a retired mainframe dinosaur, was a database specialist as an independent consultant. This stuff still interests me, and I remember when they were exploring quartz crystals for storage, never really followed up on the research.

[Tench_Coxe]

Like thendidsks in Star Trek’s “All Our Yesterdays”.

[Wuli]

Ahhh, but terbium is one of the rarest of rare earth minerals

[Larry Lucido]

It's been done before.

[GingisK]

The question would then be, "Will the obsolete the I/O device for it after you accumulate a lifetime of data?".

There is a long list of media that still contains useful information that is lost forever for want of a device to read it. I know this first hand.

[Bob434]

Don’t worry, its gorilla glass

[Buttons12]

It’ll never replace lenticular gag shop spectacles.

[wildcard_redneck]

The hippies were right. Crystals have awesome powers.

[Wuli]

I went through two periods as a company’s IT director where we transferred important data from older media to what would be our newest media, to be sure, in spite of time, we could still get to it if needed.

I did it at home, a number of times, with my PCs, as older data storage media was becaming obsolete.

Just for show, I still have a few 5 1/2 inch floppy disks on an office bookshelf.

[Red Badger]

Ahh, but do you have any 12 inch floppies?...........

[GingisK]

Just for show, I still have a few 5 1/2 inch floppy disks...

So do I, along with the 8" variety. ;-D

I also have a collection of fuse-link, UV-PROM, and EEPROM memory devices.

I wish I had a set of AM2900 bit-slice elements.

[GingisK]

...12 inch floppies?...

I did a safety system for NASA in Huntsville that included 14" floppies for announcement playback. Those were just pitiful.

[No name given]

I believe so.

[No name given]

That’s right.