In a global of magnets and miracles, step again in time with
us for a moment as we go back to America of 1956. The Eisenhower Administration
have just entered into what became to emerge as the Vietnam War; it became a
time of mounting political turmoil however of monetary surety. Society was
re-rising from its publish-warfare doldrums: Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, and
Doris Day crowned the track charts; and Peyton Place became at the New York
Times excellent-vendor list for fifty nine weeks. Eschewing the1940s stark
simplicity, style noticed a romantic revival with women flaunting
extremely-feminine silks and chiffons whilst men were rushing in tweeds and
Edwardian reduce velvets. John Wayne, Charlton Heston, and Zsa Zsa Gabor graced
our movie displays and we pleased to the phobia of the movie The Invasion of
the Body Snatchers. It was a heady time certainly…
That 12 months became destined to be a awesome one in
computing and electronics records. Over at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ,
William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain – inventors of the
factor-touch transistor – won the Nobel Prize for Physics ‘for his or her
researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor impact.’(1)
And within the International Business Machines Corporation’s (IBM)
Poughkeepsie, NY, lab, Arthur L. Samuel validated the first use of artificial
intelligence by way of programming an IBM 704 to not most effective play a
sport of checkers, but to examine from its revel in. A 12 months later, the
ground-breaking programming language FORTRAN, dubbed ‘the mom tongue of medical
computing’ by using Cecil E. Leith, turned into advanced by way of the
corporation for medical and engineering programs. And additionally on this 12
months, IBM hooked up its nanotechnology research laboratory in San Jose, the
thrashing heart of California’s nascent Silicon Valley.
“It’s tremendous to recognise that IBM honestly had 35 years
of nanotechnology history earlier than it changed into even a search time period.”
So studies on the nano-degree – no matter being a seemingly
new kid at the technology block – definitely has an extended lineage than we
may think. As one reader noted: “It’s superb to understand that IBM certainly
had 35 years of nanotechnology history before it turned into even a search
term.” Amazing certainly. And the drumbeat of technological advancement
inevitably brings with it the call for increasing traits in records garage.
Let’s use a stellar example …
Just 13 years after the established order of IBM’s San Jose
laboratory, the world witnessed an unparalleled achievement. In 1969, the
Apollo eleven lunar touchdown challenge set Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin at
the moon’s surface, with Michael Collins piloting the command module, Columbia,
in lunar orbit. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) which brought the astronauts
on an approximate 480,000 miles round trip throughout area became coded thru
assembler language with instructions for the voyage being fed into the AGC
through punch cards. The AGC – then state-of the-artwork – boasted a large 64K
of reminiscence.(2) Sixty-4 kilobytes.
Fast forward to
almost 50 years later and our modern toasters demand more reminiscence than
that. And with costs dropping, the need for RAM and extra hard drive capacity
growing, and the impractical nature of storing records on punch playing cards,
magnetic disk drives are now the norm. The bleeding area of new brand new
garage generation lies with the work of companies like Seagate whose studies
prioritizes the improvement of excessive-capability disks on a nano-scale,
manufactured in cleanroom environments. According to The Register, a
international online tech booklet, leaders in pressure recording technology are
actively reconsidering the version of statistics storage.
Previous paradigms noticed the magnetized domain of the disk
platters organized flat on the disk surface, but new strategies of
perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) flip that model via ninety ranges,
storing the domains vertically. This change lets in for an boom in statistics
storage capacity in the identical physical area. How lots? Actually, it’s
pretty a lot. Seagate reports that the use of PMR the areal density of the disk
comes in at 800GBit in step with inch squared that's a climb from just 400GBits
in the equal vicinity of their 2009 prototypes. And then there’s also their
potential to leverage shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and heat-assisted
magnetic recording (HAMR).
Welcome to the quantum world of unmarried atom garage…
So with an powerful doubling of potential inside 8 years,
how may want to this price of progress be advanced upon? Well, astute readers
will no doubt have noticed that every of those three technology use magnetism
in their recording era. And the usage of this property isn't confined to
standard disk drives. Let’s take a near look – a virtually near appearance – at
a shape of generation that would allow magnetic garage at densities one
thousand times more than currently hard disks permit.(3) Welcome to the quantum
global of unmarried atom garage
