4 ms·

I'm not sure what you mean by magically. For every tech that makes it to production there are one or two others that don't and people just forget about them. Fo

by wmf 3y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by magically. For every tech that makes it to production there are one or two others that don't and people just forget about them. For example, storage roadmaps used to show bit-patterned media. Phase-change memory would have been nice to have too.

magicalhippo 3y ago
I recall reading about holographic storage[1] back in the 90s, was supposed to become a big thing "real soon". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage
- Twirrim 3y ago
  There's whitepapers and articles every few years on Holographic storage, it's one of those perpetually just around the corner things. See also memristors, that HP in particular have been saying is coming in the next couple of years, fundamentally changing the entire computing industry, for decades.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  It's not dead yet[1] but, yes, it's never quite caught on the way so many of us thought it would back in the 1980s and 90s. The 1987 movie "Innerspace" even referred to "photon echo memory chips." Friends of mine worked for years at one of the companies mentioned in the Wiki page but came up just a little short. FWIW, gallium arsenide was also supposed to take over from silicon for CPUs once speeds went above 25-MHz (or so). A senior colleague of mine said, "There are a lot of smart people whose kids's college tuition depend on making silicon a little better every year." And so, it came to pass. GaAs is definitely important but we've got multi-GHz silicon CPUs now. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/hsd/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/hsd/ "Project HSD: Holographic Storage Device for the Cloud"
Clamchop 3y ago
If we extend that to medical, the graveyard is bananas big.

4 ms·

I'm not sure what you mean by magically. For every tech that makes it to production there are one or two others that don't and people just forget about them. Fo

by wmf 3y ago

magicalhippo 3y ago
I recall reading about holographic storage[1] back in the 90s, was supposed to become a big thing "real soon". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage
- Twirrim 3y ago
  There's whitepapers and articles every few years on Holographic storage, it's one of those perpetually just around the corner things. See also memristors, that HP in particular have been saying is coming in the next couple of years, fundamentally changing the entire computing industry, for decades.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  It's not dead yet[1] but, yes, it's never quite caught on the way so many of us thought it would back in the 1980s and 90s. The 1987 movie "Innerspace" even referred to "photon echo memory chips." Friends of mine worked for years at one of the companies mentioned in the Wiki page but came up just a little short. FWIW, gallium arsenide was also supposed to take over from silicon for CPUs once speeds went above 25-MHz (or so). A senior colleague of mine said, "There are a lot of smart people whose kids's college tuition depend on making silicon a little better every year." And so, it came to pass. GaAs is definitely important but we've got multi-GHz silicon CPUs now. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/hsd/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/hsd/ "Project HSD: Holographic Storage Device for the Cloud"
Clamchop 3y ago
If we extend that to medical, the graveyard is bananas big.