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IBM Reinvents Punch Cards
grim_thing writes "I.B.M. scientists say they have created a data-storage technology that can store the equivalent of 200 CD-ROM's on a surface the size of a postage stamp. Writing in the current issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, researchers at I.B.M.'s laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks." Reuters also has a story.
I'd have thought that most of the optical media, such as CD-ROM, was the spirtual, if not linear, descendant of punch cards. Only difference is how many holes, the idea of spinning for faster access, and using a "las-er" instead of some form of mechanical armature.
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What if one's data contains dimpled chads? How will those bits be counted?
You are not the customer.
So, that would be 120Gb in the size of a postage stamp. Not bad. Even if it takes a long time to write and longer to read back, this could wipe out tape archival for most backup purposes!
So, is the data stored in blocks of 25 rows of 80 columns? This will be handy for FORTH systems without file systems, and FORTRAN IV,66 and 77 programmers.
Stick Men
They just sold their Hard disk unit to hitachi. And a few days later they report a new storage format.
Makes you think...
just thinkin
I want 2D games back.
Seriously... doesn't this announcement come at a strange time, when IBM plans to phase out it's IDE hard drives in the short term...
~ now you know
Since there isn't a whole lot of details about this technology and exactly when it will show up in store shelves, it's kind of hard to guess IBM's plans for this technology. How plausible is it that IBM has something totally knew to replace HD technology and this is just another related development. Whether this can/could/should/would replace HD is hard to say without real data, but it might provide a clue. IBM might have some other bleeding edge technology lined up for mass storage, which lead to the development of this product?
Can we get that translated into a tandard measurement, like Library's of Congress?
...the big blue relatively frequently comes up with reports/announces of various types of advanced technology regarding storage, yet they haven't shown an actual product for even one of these technologies? They are not even exceptionaly good on the HD market too (i don't bash them. i am just curious.)
:/
Technology is all sweet and nice...but without a product
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I seems every couple of months one of these "new storage breakthrough" comes along. What happens to them? Where do they go? It seems like these things have yet to make it into consumer (or even "professional") technology. Have heard a lot about high density solid state storage, and stuff like that, yet I still have a platter spinning at 7200RPM next to my feet. Arn't we a little outdated by other technology standards using spinning pieces of metal to store our information, with no end in sight?
These things are cool, but they become science breakthroughs, not news for nerds...stuff that matters? Do breakthroughs like this really matter to us? I am asking this because I really don't know. Where have semi-recent "Breakthroughs" like this made it into consumer technology that you and I can buy today? Or next year?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
His holes are 10 nanometers ... and about 3 billion of them fit in a punch card hole
I read the news today, oh boy
4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancastershire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
I'd love to turn you on
Seriously... doesn't this announcement come at a strange time, when IBM plans to phase out it's IDE hard drives in the short term...
Think about it -- it may be that this is *why* the whole operation was sold off!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I'd hate to drop a deck of punch cards that size. You'd need a microscope to put them back in order.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Actually, I only use two CDs to install Red Hat, not six. Sure, the professional version comes with six, but that is all the software you'll need to run any type of server you could want. Tons of text editors, multiple browsers, image editors (gimp, etc), office suites (staroffice), and lots and lots more, as well as source code for pretty much everything.
I don't know of any version of Windows that fits all of those utilities on one CD, or even six for that matter. You'll need CDs for Windows, MS Office (full version is four CDs by itself), a paint program like Photoshop (another CD), MS Exchange for e-mail, and so on and so forth.
Frankly, I think your comment is a bunch of FUD, especially when there are entire versions of Linux out there now that come on just one DVD-ROM. Pretty much every distro comes with a graphical installer, a text-based one, and options for FTP installs. And, you don't need a special version to do an "upgrade install" on an existing system, if you don't want to rewrite all your files with a "full install" (Microsoft likes to charge more for these features). It doesn't get more convenient than that.
The speed of time is one second per second.
It will definitely be different, and it's got some cool advantages. The announcement from IBM Research labs in Zurich talk about a data storage density 20 times that of today's best magnetic storage. Briefly, tiny V shaped heads make holes 10 nanometers wide in a plastic film - there are a number of interesting stats and potential applications described in the article, as well as some animations (1,2). The story is also reported in The NY Times and C|Net.
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
So, there's a thousand red-hot pokers, melting a trillion holes in a square of plexiglass. Each poker will make a half billion holes just filling up the chip the first time. Eeek! I assume these chips will come with plenty of error detection/correction, so that if one of the pokers quits, the remaining ones will give you the clues to what was in that 0.1% that you just lost.
But certainly, there must be some sort of failure rate for each poker, and the chip... Is it too soon to know/guess these numbers?
Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen are crying ...
200 cd-roms is (roughly) 120Gb. On something smaller than a microdrive. Space-wise, you're talking over 100 times more efficient.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Seriously... doesn't this announcement come at a strange time, when IBM plans to phase out it's IDE hard drives in the short term...
Yup... I don't think IBM would've given up 40 years of technical leadership in hard-drive technology if it hadn't already seen the writing on the wall. In the short term, hard drives have become a commodity business and it's been harder and harder for IBM (and others) to squeeze a profit from the business. Long term, hard drives are a buggy-whip business - a technological dead-end. That's why IBM has poured so much money into basic research on quantum devices and molectronics.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Does this mean that the people who are running these old systems can finally upgrade?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
sPh
Why does this sound like the Google Page Ranking System based on Pigeon Technology?
I don't know, there may be some prior art here.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Are easily explained by this tidbit of news.
Of course alot of people will be making jokes about punchcard technology. However, this technologie might solve the problems current drive manufacturers are facing. As the article states this might be a technology on the turning point of current mass storage. The similarity between punchcards and this product are only the use of "holes".
This could be the breakthrough for data storage.
1984: Wow! Twenty megabytes! I'll never use all this space! ... Ah, screw it.
1988: Wow! Eighty megabytes! I'll never use all this space!
1994: Wow! A gigabyte! I'll never use all this space!
1999: Uh, wow. Twenty gigabytes? I don't think I'll ever use all this space.
2002: A hundred and twenty gigs? I... hm.
2005:
This might be just what is need to get permanent storage. The life expectency of most media we have around today is fairly short in terms of it's overall data rentention capabilities.
Taking these storage units, mounting them on something sturdy and sealing them in a vacuum container to prevent corrosion or breakdown and now the life of your data is incredibly longer.
How short do you think the life cycle is on these things? You're looking at a minimum of 5 to 10 years for most lab findings to make it to market. And don't forget, the all-mighty economy comes into play too. If it can't be produced cheaply enough in large enough quantities, it just becomes, "research results upon which other research is based on"
The toys you're using now are the result of announcements made a long time ago. It's just that our memories are short. I remember many years ago when WORM drives first came out - ooh...1GB of storage - so what if you can only write it once, you'll never run out of that much space, *drool* *slaver*... Now I have a desk covered in CD's, half of which are from AOL...
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
This is interesting, considering the fact that they're quitting the hard drive business. Anybody think they'll reconsider?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
out as the demo 'discs'. Postage Stamp on one side and 330 hours! on the back, plus the new version of Netscape, which will take up the rest of the space.
Um, no. That would be about 1/8 the size of an atom. They also say the storage medium is "a layer of plexiglass a couple of billionths of an inch thick". That would be 1/2 the size of an atom, which is quite remarkable considering that plexiglass is a polymer.
Reuters: "[The] holes are 10 nanometers. . ."
Much more credible. That's about 100 atoms across.
Why am I not surprised that no one at the Times caught this?
The measurement of Libraries of Congress/hectare is getting less and less useful. Since the Library of Congress does store audio information, and the number of bits on a phonograph can fluctuate greatly... I mean, we've been measuring data in LoC's since the early 80's. Surely the LoC has much more data now than in the far forgotten past?
Isn't it better to measure in #of pages of single spaced text in feet? I.e. : That disk can hold enough data to store a stack of paper 300' tall printed with nothing but ones and zeros. But then we get into arguments about how thick the paper is...
:-/
Hmm...
They just sold their Hard disk unit to hitachi. And a few days later they report a new storage format.
But the new technology is 10 years from market - with maybe a 1% chance of actually getting to market.
Point taken, but you may want to take a quick refresher course in IBM history and corporate culture. To say "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing" does not even begin to capture it. Something like "the right hand doesn't know what the giant squid banana fish love Neptune" would be more like it.
Seriously, big blue is huge. I'd say there's little chance that the folks who shut down the hard drive division knew (or cared) that some branch of the research division were about to make an announcment like this.
Chances are they don't even know now.
umm thats 116Gb per square inch
for comparison the GXP 120 has a maximum density of 29.7 Gigabits per square inch
29,700,000,000 bits
~3,712,500,000 bytes
~3,625,488 Kb
~3,540 Mb
~3.45 Gb per square inch
116/3.45 is 33 times greater than the density of a GXP 120.
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(yeah, I know... the sig is wrong... so what?)
You could make it:
667 The creepy neighbor across the street from the Beast
or
667 The guy across the street from the Beast, who despite several complaints to the Homeowner's Association, still hasn't mowed his lawn to regulation height!
or...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I must admit, I love this quote: The technology, ... was conceived by two scientists at IBM's Zurich research labs, who discussed the idea over beer after the company's weekly soccer games
Hey, here's to drinking and computer development!!
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
640 Kb will be enough for everyone.
Where do you think your 80GB hard drive came from? 10 years ago that was unthinkable.
15 years ago a CD Rom was an unreal amount of data.
All these things are from research.
It takes 5 to 10 years to see new technologies appear on the market *provided* that they are economically viable in the first place.
Yes, we've been hearing about Holographic storage for 10 years or more now. So what? Fuck it? Who cares?
It's not economically viable for the mass market... so it's for resarch.
In 10 or 20 years, when we are tossing holocrystal storage around like it ain't no thing, with a 1 pS read/write latency and a density of 40 TB per square inch.
Back around '79 or so, I remember hearing a COBOL trainer (in a corporate setting) assert that in the next century, there would be a language called COBOL, even if there was not way of knowing what it would evolve (or maybe the word is mutate) into. By now, I feel pretty secure in seconding his notion that COBOL, the Legacy Language from Heck, is never gonna fade away. (In fact, as a career option I'm weighing COBOL as a language to concentrate on.) IBM apparently feels the same way, so it's not too surprising that they'd come up with a whole new way to archive all those billions of lines of code in the handy, familiar 80x25 format.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
. . . about 25 times as great as current hard disks.
All right, so how much denser is it than punch cards?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Reminds me of this Homer Simpson quote:
...if anyone works at the post office, please be on the lookout for a letter from IBM labs, I left my glasses at home, and it looked like a stamp...
You are right that my numbers (10 years development, 99% chance of failure) are wild guesses - based on 35 years of watching promising new technologies move, or usually not, from the labs. Lots of unexpected problems turn up in trying to commercialize new technology, so most new developments die without ever being produced. If it gets past that hurdle, it will still die in the market unless it is much better than existing technologies, which haven't been standing still while all the problems are worked out. For example, bubble memory once sounded this good relative to competing technology (almost as fast as semiconductor RAM, nonvolatile, and might have been cheaper than disk drives), but by the time it was actually in mass production, semiconductor RAM was much faster and cheaper, while hard drives had shrunk from the size of washing machines to small enough for PC's, became cheaper and more capacious than bubble and not too much slower. There weren't enough applications where bubble was definitely better to support efficient mass production, so it was soon priced right out of the market.
Judging from this report, they haven't taken the first steps to commercializing the hole memory. They are writing and reading with a scanning electron microscope - a lab instrument that probably costs six figures. And they are writing 1,000 times slower than a modern hard drive. It would be nice to have a full backup of the server farm fit on a credit card, but not if it takes days to complete the backup... They need to move it to a purpose-built machine, solve the speed problem, get the cost way down, standardize formats, and get the drives and cartridges on the market. Sounds like ten years - if it is possible to solve the cost and the speed problems in the same machine. Using 1,000 heads instead of one would solve the speed problem _today_, but it sure doesn't help the cost issue. And by the time they are ready to market it, what will they be competing against?
Huh? GMR hit the shelves relatively quick after discovery. The pixie dust thing too.
D 20 1%2526a%253D2811,00.asp
http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,3396,s%253
was "already shipping"
IBM has moved LOTs of stuff from research to the market rather quickly and more consistently than many others.
... you can write your PhD thesis, the Great American Novel, 2 slashdot comments and still have time to burn.
The plastic sits on a piece of silicon. Hovering above it are roughly 1,000 tiny phonograph arms, each with a needle on the end
I assume this means that these arms must move around the media, so seek times will probably be slow. Also, what happens when one or more of the "arms" becomes defective/breaks? Obviously error correction will have to be built into the system. Though interestingly, since it depends on indents/holes, theoretically you could read the thing using a sufficiently powerful microscope if the rw mechanism ever failed.
Given IBM's need for continued growth, if they have a technology in house that they think has, say, a 33% chance of replacing hard drive, it would make perfect sense to sell the hard drive business for 20 billion and invest 6 billion in the new technology. A gamble, but with a potentially huge payoff
Well sure, in theory. If it's a good investment, they'll make it. However, I hope you're not insinuating that the numbers 20B, 6B and 33% have any mathematical relation to this decision because that would be ridiculous.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Maybe now this phrase can make a comeback.
The P5s I have don't care much one way or the other. :-)
("P5" refers to a somewhat older processor than you think.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
It's always been a problem with the magnetic techniques of hard drives to actually erase data. Even after formatting and overwriting, you can still read old bits because of the inprecision in the writing techniques (see this article). Would this eliminate such a threat?
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Judging from this report, they haven't taken the first steps to commercializing the hole memory. They are writing and reading with a scanning electron microscope - a lab instrument that probably costs six figures. And they are writing 1,000 times slower than a modern hard drive. It would be nice to have a full backup of the server farm fit on a credit card, but not if it takes days to complete the backup... They need to move it to a purpose-built machine, solve the speed problem, get the cost way down, standardize formats, and get the drives and cartridges on the market. Sounds like ten years - if it is possible to solve the cost and the speed problems in the same machine. Using 1,000 heads instead of one would solve the speed problem _today_, but it sure doesn't help the cost issue. And by the time they are ready to market it, what will they be competing against?
The core of the Millipede project is a two-dimensional array of v-shaped silicon cantilevers that are 0.5 micrometers thick and 70 micrometers long. At the end of each cantilever is a downward-pointing tip less than 2 micrometers long. The current experimental setup contains a 3 mm by 3 mm array of 1,024 (32 x32) cantilevers, which are created by silicon surface micromachining. A sophisticated design ensures accurate leveling of the tip array with respect to the storage medium and dampens vibrations and external impulses. Time-multiplexed electronics, similar to that used in DRAM chips, address each tip individually for parallel operation. Electromagnetic actuation precisely moves the storage medium beneath the array in both the x- and y-directions, enabling each tip to read and write within its own storage field of 100 micrometers on a side. The short distances to be covered help ensure low power consumption.
While current data rates of individual tips are limited to the kilobits-per-second range, which amounts to a few megabits for an entire array, faster electronics will allow the levers to be operated at considerably higher rates. Initial nanomechanical experiments done at IBM's Almaden Research Center showed that individual tips could support data rates as high as 1 - 2 megabits per second.
Sounds like they are not reading with a TEM but with real devices, the speed problems have already been adressed, as well as power considerations. The only thing left is cost =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This technology sounds just like Stephenson's Diamond Age, where the nanobook had a vast amount of data and programming in it for the entire education of a child, and only the human voice readers weren't stored.
Score another one for scifi.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Because of their low speeds, I see these developments replacing things like tape-drives and such, rather than replacing primary (RAM) or secondary (HD, CD, DVD) storage. In other words, nanotubes, &c. will comprise slow and super-dense tertiary storage. The gap between CPU and memory speeds is already widening. We don't need something to exacerbate that gap.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Didn't I see somewhere that a (60MHz -- original) pentium made out of vacuum tubes (or valves, for you brits) would take up several football fields?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I hadn't realized from the first article that they already had their MEMS chip sort of running rather than just talking about it. But they've still got a long ways to go. I don't see how they'll get the speed they need without giving each head its own drive circuit so all the heads can go at once, rather than X-Y addressing. They've got to put the drive electronics on the chip, then figure out how to produce it at a reasonable cost. 3mm square is almost as big as a Pentium CPU.
Five years might be possible, if production experience with the few other MEMS devices now being produced is relevant to sorting out the issues with this one, and if IBM doesn't let bureacracy get in the way. (I'm afraid that last requirement is about as likely as a Vulcan ship stopping by and helping us solve all our problems...)
A practical storage device will also have to move the chip over the media, or vice versa, with accuracy of a few nanometers, and probably will have to work in two dimensions. (Disk head coils only work in one.) This is easy if you don't mind spending a lot of money, but they'll have to get the transport mechanism cost down to maybe $20 before it becomes a consumer product.
So how much money were they asking for and how much did you give them? That page reads like something a poor mind numbed star trek addict would write up. (note: I like star trek and all, but the explanations for how the technology works is mind numbing, in the lack of coherency.)
They use all the buzz words, and they try so hard to convince you that unproven (yet not disproven) theories prove that thier product will even work. They claim to have lost funding as a 'result' of 9/11 too. They claim that they can get lasers through a ferroelectric dipolar substrate. Correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't ferroelectrics oxidized, crystaline iron? Are they even transparent? They also seem highly prone to material defects, as all crystals are.
Anyways, if the company is legit congrats to them for finally bringing holographic storage out of the research phase. However, I'd want to see the 'research team' before I gave them any of My money, If this is just one guy out of his house it is probably a scam. Especially if he's been at it for 14 years like the website seems to say (finally after 14 years etc..)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html