360 TB on a single disk that lasts forever

That's great news cuz I have a REALLY large project I wanted to save in pizza oven for (only) a few hundred million years. JK. I saw a 4 TB drive advertised yesterday and thought that was huge.

With inexpensive readers, I can see an immediate market for software distribution.  Especially the large sample libraries we use so much.
 
 

I, too, am skeptical when it comes to promised technology. I first heard about holographic storage in 1972! Then there was bubble RAM in the early 80's, which was going to eliminate booting because it was non-volatile. It made it into handheld barcode readers and that was it.
 
But then I think back to emerging technologies I saw that just took a while to become commercialized. The first VCR I saw was at the UW Computer Fair around 1973. It would be another 10 years before I could buy one. (And wouldn't you know it, I invested in Sony's Beta standard and it was obsolete 10 years later.)
 
Around 1985 I saw laser disks being used for mass data storage at the National Weather Service. A $75 disk could hold as much data as a half-dozen hard drives of the day (which went for $50,000 apiece). I thought it held great promise, and you could say I was wrong about that. But look at it this way: the technology was invented in 1958 (!) and eventually evolved into today's CD and DVD standards. So in a way, when you pop a movie into your DVD player you're using 1950's technology.
 
At the 1962 World's Fair I saw a picture phone at the AT&T exhibit. I thought it was cool, but didn't think it was viable because I immediately thought about whether people would answer the phone in their underwear. My verdict was justified for the next 40 years, but now video calls are commonplace.
 
A year earlier I'd attended a home show (the celebrity draw was the then-campaigning JFK) that displayed a number of futuristic technologies. It was there I saw my first jet boat and my first microwave oven, both of which became affordable products. But I also saw a demonstration of a jet pack. That one never caught on.
 
So yes, I am skeptical. I do not know how complicated or expensive the equipment is. It may initially be reserved for large organizations that archive large amounts of data. But remember, computers were once reserved for governments and mega-corporations.
 

I did my first experiments with computer sound in 1981. It was fun hearing my voice back from the tiny speaker in my Apple ][, even if it was garbled.
 
But if you'd told me then that I'd someday be processing high-fidelity audio using only the computer's own CPU, I'd have said you were nuts. After all, the CPU would have to be 1,000 times faster than that 6502, and there's no way they'd get such a complex circuit to work reliably at 1 Gigaherz!
 
And yes, I was a computer professional at the time. In my defense, I had not been one long enough to understand Moore's Law.

I too built a speech synthesizer from a kit interfaced to an rs-232 port. It was crude and worked at the command line prompt. Just to think of all the computer code and syntax we learned back then, was to be replaced in a large part by a GUI. It should be viewed as having learned a second language. Btw, this 1982 device still works!

History will show that the most reliable backup and storage of information was achieved using stone tablets. Is there any other medium out there that will allow you to read data after 5,000 years? It seems that the higher the level of technology, the shorter its life span.

ampfixer
History will show that the most reliable backup and storage of information was achieved using stone tablets. Is there any other medium out there that will allow you to read data after 5,000 years? It seems that the higher the level of technology, the shorter its life span.

Clay tablets, cuts into bone, vellum if it's been somewhere where it won't rot or the ink fade too much. There's a bit of an argument in the UK government/civil servoce at the moment about precisely this. Up to now law passed by Parliament and some other stuff such as important decisions of the Privy Council have been recorded on vellum because it's known to be readable for hundreds of years. Their are many readable records and accounts on vellum in the UK archives going back 800+ years. The debate is whether to move to some other medium, objections to changing being part hidebound (sorry) traditionalists, more seriously that there still isn't anything known for certain to be as long-lasting.

As for modern technology, the rate of change is incredible. Especially in electronics, though the transistor density on chips, and therfore cpu power per core, seems to be reaching the maximum possible limit unless something like quantum computing can be made to work. Not long ago there was a new and significantly better cpu every few years, now computers don't get out of date like they used to. They just get made obselete by software not supporting them any more instead :-/