>
> In 5 years or so, when we all have dockable personal computers in
> credit card size, working at 10 GHz and with 100 TB storage, may
> we perhaps still be running Linux.....
>
> I guess the UFO-article was a joke, but the fact is that existing
> Earth developed technology is 2000 times better (Humans: 170 TB on a
> credit card, fake aliens: 90 GB on a poker chip). A good article
> about it can be found in the Linux friendly magazine "c't":
[SNIPPED]
New "Flying Saucer Hard Disk Drives"
March 11, 1998
Richard B. Johnson
Foreword.
We have heard about "Flying Saucer Technology" from Roswell,
New Mexico. This is not it.
The typical life of a Hard Disk drive is only about 5 years.
We now have the technology to make RAM that requires only a
few picowatts to keep it alive so it will retain data.
We also have the technology to produce batteries that will
keep such RAM alive and well for over 10 years.
Therefore, if we were to make a "Disk Drive" that stored its
data in RAM rather than mechanical magnetic components, we
have created a storage device that will run at RAM speeds
and maintain its data content for over 10 years. These
things already exist.
The problem with RAM has been cost, specifically, the cost
per bit. If the bit density were to increase four-fold, the
cost would decrease proportionally. RAM cost has been coming
down over the past few years. However, the slope of the cost
decrease has leveled out so, it is unlikely that the cost of
RAM will continue to decrease until some new methods of im-
plementing RAM become producible.
There are new kinds of RAM being developed in laboratories
all around the world. Some of the most remarkable technolo-
gies use actual atoms as storage elements and you can't get
much smaller than that. If the "atomic storage" RAM devices
become producible, the bit-density of RAM using such tech-
nology will be many orders of magnitude greater than any-
thing we can purchase today.
This means that we may soon be able to purchase a new "Disk
Drive" that weighs a few grams, transfers data via gigabit
fiber optical cable, and contains 2^64 bytes or more data
space.
This technology is hardly something from the Flying Saucers
of Roswell, it is just the natural result of 35 years of RAM
development. There are some new inventions and a lot of new
thought that goes into the development of such RAM, but it's
still RAM.
One of the problems that may seem very basic, but has until
recently been a major stumbling block in producing RAM with
decreasing size bit cells is eliminating bad bits. As the
bit cell size decreases, the chances of having a bad bit in-
creases. Conventional mapping out of bad bits requires com-
plex on-chip circuitry and test vectors.
Now, it is not important for RAM to look physically as it
looks logically. The bits that make up bytes, words, and
other logical storage elements don't have to be contiguous.
They only have to be unique. This means that a logical ad-
dressing pattern can be built from randomly-located bits.
This can be done with any two-way medium that has the re-
quired spatial resolution. Since we are dealing with atoms,
a good communications medium is photons.
Photons can be used to deposit charges on the RAM bit ele-
ments during writing, and used to detect the present charge
during reading. This is all old technology. The Iconoscope
Television camera tube, invented in the 1941 by V. Zworykin,
worked this way. Basically, data are written and read from
the atomic levels of the device as a serial bit-stream. A
stream of collimated and focused photons scans the bit-
cells. The scanning is done with piezoelectric effects dis-
covered by the brothers Curie in 1880.
Wonderfully simple techniques convert these bits to bytes,
words, or other storage elements (if needed), while ignoring
any bad bits. Basically an image of any bad bits found,
masks them from the bit-stream. Eighty year old superhetero-
dyne techniques can be used to convert serial data from the
external fiber optic cable to the internal serializer.
This stuff didn't come from Flying Saucers.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
***** FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED *****
Penguin : Linux version 2.1.87 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips).
Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
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