No kidding. A new technology has been developed that not only can store mind-boggling amounts of data, that data is essentially indestructible. This medium can handle temperatures up to 1000 degrees C. They estimate a lifespan of 13.8 billion years, three times the age of our planet. The dream of truly permanent data storage could soon be a reality.
 
Of course, it's just a laboratory curiosity at the moment, not a commercial product - yet. Initially, it'll probably be an expensive process provided by specialty companies as an archiving service. But it's just a matter of time before it makes all current long-term storage technologies obsolete.
 

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.

Interesting. I find it hard to get excited about it though as they have been promising holographic memory for decades. We are still waiting...
 
I'll believe it when I see it on the shelves.

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

Will they come with a free flying car?
 
I am surprised computer parts manufacturers are able to make a profit these days, but I certainly DO enjoy the low low prices for things.
 
Bob Bone
 

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 understand. When I first started into computers of my own, it was with a VIC-20. At that time it was almost inconceivable to have 8 bit (256 colors for those keeping score) displays outside large computing or gov't labs. Likewise, a 1GB drive was just science fiction. Now we can have real time video on multiple 30 bit 4K displays with ungodly refresh rates backed by multi-terabyte storage on our personal computers. I like it!
 
But there has always been something about holographic type storage that just keeps slipping. Like, as you said, since 1972. Every few years some university announces another mega storage method. They don't ever come to the market (at least not the PC market) though.
 
However, the same was said about AI. That is getting closer to 'personal tech' now too. Maybe too close according to some alarmists.

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.

This technology has been touted by optics physicists for a few decades already, and glass is not a solid crystalline structure. I didn't get too deep into this since I have seen a lot of optical storage experiments not get as far as they claimed was achievable; not only for lack of precision mind you, but for terrifying write/read times (and you thought HDD were slow!)

Scientists take to aggrandizing things more than engineers... Or even musicians.

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!