Remember 3D holographic data cubes? I was promised, in the mid-1990s, that we'd have them by 2000 and that they would have "up to" 100 times the storage capacity of a DVD.
I worked on holographic data storage in LiNbO3 crystals in the early 2000 years. We had a lab prototype which would store over 1 GB in roughly a sugar cube size of crystal. The technology is certainly possible. However, the amount of optics required made it a huge and expensive system and there was not a lot of funding. Using modern diode lasers, the setup could be minimized a lot.
However, the big limit is the wavelength of light. Green light has roughly 500nm of wavelength, and that determines the smalles features. This value back then was small but is huge compared to modern chip structures. We were losing the density battle even back then. There is one trait still not matched though: stability. Those crystals are about the toughest things imaginable. Unless you smash them with a hammer, they won't rot or decay. Storage times of hundreds if not thousands of years would be possible.
Long-term storability seems very desirable for certain classes of data. But a problem might be to conserve the crystal reader system which I assume needs to be well-calibrated and sort of fragile. You might have to have some sort of bootstrapping solution like very basic materials and instructions to build a simple 3D printer which then builds a more complicated assembly system which is then able to build the crystal reader.
Actually, the way we wrote the data, you don't need a complex reader system. Illuminating the spot where the data was stored with a laser beam would project a 2d image, like a large QR-code, which any camera could pick up. So the reading equipment would rather easy to replicate.
Yeah, so we currently have micro-SD cards with a 1TB capacity, which is 100 times the storage capacity of a DVD. I see your holographic data cube and raise you a fingernail.
Every few years I remember the story from 2000-2001 claiming that a German research lab successfully stored 10GB WORM on a roll of clear sticky tape ("Scotch" tape).
I couldn't really tell if it was serious or not at the time, but it looks like nothing has come of it.
Oh the good times... I remember when before christmas Steffen and Matthias goofed around in the university basement with their equipment... Actually they pivoted from data storage to security and anti tamper stickers, and are still in business [0, 1].
Steffen Noethe is into life sciences since 2013 [2].
P.S.: It did work for up to five or so layers, then focusing and laser power were hard to handle. They never developed a robust drive from that principle and the spot in between flash, DVDs and tape was closing too fast to create enough business...
Paper storage was another weird one literally use a sheet of paper to store information. Dots or symbols of some sort and hundreds of gigabytes stored on a sheet of paper.
I tried it and it did print on paper but it seems the application isn't great on connecting to a modern scanner of a multi-function printer MFP. It's a networked MFP but even with the MFP connected via USB it balks and says no scanner found.
I was thinking about how it probably hasn't aged well and went off looking for forks or other projects like it. I found this and am considering building it play around: https://git.teknik.io/scuti/paperback-cli
technically, every flash memory today is a cube (well, more of a skewed cube, a Parallelepiped)
Mostly because they can't figure out how to make things faster, or as fast as the interface which keeps getting faster, so they just pile a bunch of flash controllers on top of each other. Everyone is running stripped RAID-0 and don't even know it.
And if you consider that it also uses varying analog voltage values on each node (!SLC), it is arguably a 4d cube. Take that, 90s!
I kinda miss this "storage media enthusiasm" of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sure I like my usbkeys and cloud storage, but its just not the same as "data cubes", scotch tape or even just actual products in these weird "in-between" times back then like jaz&clik drives, minidiscs, etc.
(microSD cards are pretty cool though)
My entry into investing was buying stock in constellation 3D a fluorescent multi layer disc/card. At the time its capacity was up there (~1TB DVD in the late 1990s). It was the clear discs and florescent layers that was interesting. The company folded and took my $3,000 with it.
