Posted on 03/09/2017 7:21:20 AM PST by Ciaphas Cain
In the never-ending quest to improve computing technology, IBM has just taken a big step smaller: It's found a way to store data on a single atom.
A hard drive today takes about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of data -- a 1 or 0. The IBM Research results announced Wednesday show how much more densely it might someday be possible to cram information.
How much more densely? Today, you can fit your personal music library into a storage device the size of a penny. With IBM's technique, you could fit Apple's entire music catalog of 26 million songs onto the same area, Big Blue said.
Atomic-level storage could radically change our computing devices. A smartwatch or ring could carry all your personal data, or businesses could keep potentially useful information that today they can't currently afford to preserve. And socking away lots of information is important for artificial intelligence, which has a voracious appetite for data used to train machine-learning systems to do their jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Somehow I would imagine the researchers have to start taking into account quantum mechanics working with single atoms.
Now that's interesting given the uncertainty principle.
Or have they caged the atom?
Sooner than later the effects at the particle level are going to begin wrecking MAJOR havoc on traditional semiconductors and the engineers determined to make them smaller and smaller...
This does seem like a very chancy proposition.
Imagine what the NSA/CIA/FBI could do with it....................maybe already are................
I remember being about 6 years old, walking down the street in 1960 and it suddenly hit me that every single thing I do and experience is NOT being recorded, and that I must depend on my memory to save it.
I believe we are entering an era where every single thing a person experienced will be recorded as a matter of course, for later playback as needed.
Meh, until they can encode data at the electron level.
You mean like this ?
We were taught in Navy training in 1970 that there were no microscopes that could see electrons. That we knew of their existence only because we could hear them bumping into each other. So if they can put that much data on one atom microscope technology must have really improved. Otherwise, why put it on there if you can’t see it to read it.
IBM does these great things but still keeps Lotus Notes around.
I think its a bit misleading. Firstly, it does not explain the quality loss. The solid state data deals with quality loss by creating duplicate data cells. So if some go bad or are simply wrong their are others that are right. An atom moves. So there must be several duplicate atoms that can handle the loss of integrity. Second, 100,000 to one is not that far. We have reduced things a great deal in the past 30 years. Remember the size of a 10 megabyte hard drive. Now you can have 4 terabytes in half the size for half the money. That’s a 8,000,000 difference.
Data storage size is just one of the issues that slows down computing. Moving it, searching it, updating it, and manipulating it are more limiting to us.
For later playback as needed... And for later PAYBACK as NEEDED.
Man that’s a lot of porn.
I guess we’re saying the same thing.
For later playback as needed... And for later PAYBACK as NEEDED.
There are many positive and, of course, negative ramifications. Imagine total recall of everything you ever experienced. Imagine how impossible any crime would really be.
The concept boggles the mind. Also, because I do think we are on the cusp of such technology, as well as unlocking the keys to immortality of the human body, I believe the Lord’s return is eminent. And this ignores all the other biblical prophesy stuff in the back of my mind as I type this.
IBM likes to play with lab experiments.
I remember when they spelled out “IBM” by moving gold atoms.
Cute and interesting but totally useless from a mass production viewpoint.
Particularly in memory circuits, it needs to work perfect, 100% of the time for decades.
At Intel, we had a circuit which would work fine for about 30 seconds...you would walk away and it would die.
We told the design team to try again and not waste more of our time.
Hard to believe that even this will look like a moderate advancement some day in the future.
By the tine these hard drives come to market they SHOULD be able to accommodate Windows 17!
(My first PC was a 486-SX with a 150 MB hard drive and 4 megs of RAM. It came loaded with MS-DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1. Those and still PLENTY of space for projects, games etc. Today the Microsoft Solitaire app by itself on the App Store is 150 MB!)
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