Re: Golden Canon
[ Home ][ Thread ][ Subject ][ Author ][ Date ]Danny Hillis
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 14:36:09 -0800
I visited Norsham, the Los Alamos company that is working on high density
archival storage.
(http://www.norsham.com) This is a very small company, but they are working
on the right problem and have a prototype of a solution. They use an ion
beam to write onto a small Si wafer which they etch and then use to produce
a Ni storage wafer by electroplating. This first half of this is pretty
much off-the-shelf technology, and the second they don't have quite worked
out yet. The limit on the density of storage would be our desire to read it
optically, which would give us a max of about 10K pages per wafer,
high-quality black and white.
They have all the usual problems of a small company problems to an extreme
(not much cash, not enough capital equipment, no real customers, only a few
people to do every thing, etc.) Still, I think they are well worth working
with. They have a couple of small research/demonstration contracts with the
government, including the National Library of Medicine and would love to
produce a Golden Canon for us. I am sure they would be happy to give us a
bid now, but I think we might want to help them refine their technolgy
first, especially if we want more that a few copies.
-danny
Reply: Stewart Brand: "Re: Golden Canon"