Blue Laser

[Brian Ellis]

I stand corrected, Wally. I agree my language was perhaps unfortunate, although I'm sure that 9o% of the peers who did try it were not in the least gullible but, as you say, had to check it out. Notwithstanding, many laymen thought it was the end of the energy crisis from newspaper reports. I believe the press was more "gullible" than scientists.

As my knowledge of particle and nuclear physics could be put into a small peanut shell, despite having done business with CERN and the EPFL plasma labs, I won't argue with your explanation

[Ray Austin]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
Ray

Are you sure that your first link isn't simply a spoof or a scam?

" The technology, in this form is costly, unreliable, and not compatible with existing disc media. "That was the reason why it has been said that an optical disc based on holography is difficult for commercialization," Machida continued.

See http://www.delphion.com/gallery

Well there you go... I give you proof, what little I have and you call it a spoof or a scam.

Obviously, this product doesn't exist and maybe will never exist. We can only go about this by what is available.

I can appreciate the stance that "I won't believe it till I see it."

I am sure there are many products that were promised and never made it, but was it because it couldn't be done or was it because a lack of $$$ and the company dried up and went away???

You have to realize as well these companies developing this technology will be licensing the rights to make it. So there's another catch-22 as to whether a product makes it to market or not... if manufacturers think it's viable enough to make any money developing it. None of these companies have plans to manufacture any of these, they are soley engineering it for the royalties on the licenses sold to the manufacturer's.

I say it can be done... and it's only a matter of time as to who can figure it out.... whoever does will receive boat loads of cash to credit themselves with.

Where were we in 1980? Who ever would have thought that you could sit down and write an email and send it all the way around the world in secs? But hey we have that stuff now so we don't even think about it.... we take it for granted.

[Ray Austin]

it's a little dated, but it's a good interesting read on holographic storage.... if you're interested in fairy tales...

http://www.inphase-tech.com/news/news/tostore.html

and...

http://www.inphase-tech.com/technology/

From http://www.duke.edu/~bsb3/physics/physics.htm

So What's the Hold-Up?

With such a good understanding of the physics behind this form of data storage, we can ask ourselves, "What is the hold-up in getting it into production?" The technology itself has only been made feasible in the past few years by advances in the "materials science of photorefractive crystals and the control of light with spatial light modulators" (6). According to Glenn T. Sincerbox, the program manager for holographic storage systems and technology at the IBM Almaden Research Center, "In the past few years, there has been considerable progress in developing affordable devices that could be used to place data pages onto laser
beams and to detect the illuminated holograms" (7). However, the best of the holographic material to-date, non-linear photorefractive crystals, are currently very expensive and have limited capabilities. The search for the best holographic medium is a major undertaking of the project. It is analogous to Edison's search for the best filament for the incandescent light bulb. In fact, one entire half of the consortium is aimed at finding that ideal material. The other group's goals include developing prototype systems (one has already been built--see cover of Laser Focus World), optimize a high-bandwidth SPM, and explore the issues concerning the architecture of the system (4).

There are several candidates for materials to date. Sincerbox notes that current work uses iron-doped lithium niobate, strontium barium niobate, or barium titanate crystals. "We're also looking into polymers and other organic materials" (4).

Conclusion:

Where there is a demand we can rest assured that there will be a supply. The demand for data storage products is a 50 billions dollar a year market (4). This demand can't help from being noticed. A "data colossus" is being created as the global economy careers head on a digital path (2). We are digitizing almost anything and everything that we get our hands on- faxes, photos, engineering-drawings, films, blueprints, etc... Michael Dertouzos, director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, has a unique way of counting data--by "LOC's" (2). One LOC is equivalent to all of the information contained within the Library of Congress, a sum of about 100 terabytes. He also speculates that the world has some 10,000 LOC's (2). That's right, a quintillion bytes, or one exabyte. Dertouzos says you could put this exabyte on a collection of PC hard drives for a mere price tag of 100 billion dollars. That's something Mr. Gates couldn't even accomplish.

Whether or not Holographic Data Storage comes to the shelves within the next decade is not the question. The question is what will come to the shelves within the next decade. Other projects running concurrently include near field recording (optical reader spans rotating disk) and atom-by-atom storage. Just think of it as the CD on the atomic scale. Whatever technology may emerge, holographic is the most likely candidate, as it promises data rates in excess of a gig per second due to parallel access (data is read in pages, not in lines, as in current magnetic storage devices.) (8). Until then, I will be patiently waiting for that one "tera" hard drive to cure me of all my lack of space for this ever-growing monster we so lovingly call "data."

[Brian Ellis]

Hee-hee, Ray Dream on ...