Is holographic no longer vaporware? (was: Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

[Stan Barr]

Hi,

Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> said:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Stan Barr wrote:
> > > BTW what happed to holographic storage anyhow?
> > Work is still in progress.  Shizuka University in Japan recently demoed
> > a device that stores 2000 gigabytes of data in a 1cm cube of material.
> > Reading and writing the data is still too slow for a practical device
> > though.   You could archive a *lot* of data with one!
> 
> Not necessarily doubting, but was that "stores", or "can store"?

A good question that had me searching through magazines to find the
article where I read about it.  It was in "New Scientist" 31 July.

It says "can store".  Re-reading the article it seems it may not be
holographic but it uses "..a red laser with a wavelentgh of 79 nm
in a way that controls the shape and spacing of individual bits, 
providing clear spacing between them. It is then read using UV light
from a helium-neon laser..".  How much data they've *actually* stored
in the device is not mentioned.


-- 
Cheers,
Stan Barr  stanb at dial.pipex.com

The future was never like this!