THE 19th century idea of storing data on punched cards could make a comeback
in the next generation of memory chips, say researchers at IBM in Zurich. They
believe a cellphone containing one of their new super-dense chips will be able
to store two full-length movies, more than 150 hours of MP3 music, or all the
information on a stack of printed paper more than 200 metres tall.
Called Millipede, the electromechanical data store uses microscopic probes to
make indentations in a polymer film. The dents represent data and are erased by
simply warming the polymer. It was far from…
