Excited about your tiny 2G memory card? Well, today’s New York Times talks about engineers being able in the near future to “combine the functions of memory chips and disk drives on a device the size of a dime.” The Times relies on a Computerworld article focused on possible benefits of nanotech. Now imagine a future desktop that might boot up instantly, store more than 10 terrabytes on a dime-sized device, and keep the data around for a century. Talk about the need for gracefully evolving e-book formats!
Oh, yes, it sounds too sci-fi-ish, but then I remember a bizarre prediction that I made in Computerworld in 1992—namely that by 2012 small, affordable devices would hold “at least a gigabyte of data” and transmission speeds would exceed a megabit. In effect I was dissin’ the future. These days I’m a tad more optimistic. Why, if the usual suspects don’t get in the way, we might even see comprehensive e-book standards at the consumer level before 2012.
About the image: It’s from a NIST page on measurement tools for nanotech.
