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Microwires Can Replace The DVD-ROM
neutron_p writes "A former Soviet Union military development finds its use in modern technology and still remains fascinating." The development comes in the form of a flexible microwire, 10 micrometers thick and 10cm long, with a metal body and a glass coating, which the linked article says "can store 10 Gigabytes of information. It is possible thanks to their magnetic properties. Anyway, it's not that easy. Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information."
From the article: The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
When they say "byte" here, they seem to mean "bit". (for the script kiddies, there are 8 bits to the byte) Also, they're referring to "10 million divisions" not "10 billion divisions".
So it wouldn't be 10 gigabytes, it would be more like 1.2 megabytes, or roughly 122k/cm. To store 10 gigabytes, it would have to be over 838m long, or over 2750 feet.
Frankly, I'm not horribly impressed.
Not to mention, this is just in theory. It hasn't actually been done yet.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Where did you hear that?
From How Stuff Works
"To create a rewriteable CD (CD-RW), you need a dye layer that can be changed back and forth between opaque and transparent. This page discusses the special material that CD-RW's use. The material has the property that it can change its transparency depending on temperature. Heated to one temperature, the material cools to a transparent state; heated to another temperature, it cools to a cloudy state. By changing the power (and therefore the temperature) of the writing laser, the data on the CD can be changed, or "rewritten.""
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Go back in time. Wire predated tape, actually. The original dictation machines were wire recorders. Wire recorders are still used for flight data and cockpit voice recorders in commercial aircraft (though they are being slowly phased out and replaced, I believe, with flash memory).
Another novel moment in the history of wire recorders: one of the first VTRs (used at the BBC) was a linear "tape" recorder. Bandwidth being proportional to the speed of the media across the head, they moved the "tape" at amazingly high speed. The only "tape" that would stand up to the stress was actually made of steel - making it more like flat wire than what we think of as tape. Couple the weight of the tape with the amount of it you needed and you wound up with huge 10 foot diameter spools of the stuff. The machine was also quite dangerous - if the tape broke, it would hurl fragments of steel that bore a not-so-passing resembelence to razor blades.
Fortunately, helical scanning was invented, which allows the heads to fly across the tape while the tape itself moves relatively slowly. But now we're drifting off topic.