DATA STORAGE
MITCH JACOBY · Chemical & Engineering News · 2000
The Wizard of Oz could have made good use of a computer. Imagine if instead of just a bunch of controls for a light and sound show behind the black curtain, he had worked his wonders with a fast laptop loaded with, say, all the world's encyclopedias. He would have been able to answer just about anything. Big Brother could have used a few gigabytes of memory too in George Orwell's "1984." Sure, he could watch what everyone was doing. But he couldn't possibly have had any way to store all that secret information—much less recall it when needed. And if Deep Thought—the stupendous supercomputer that came up with "42" as the answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"—had been outfitted with a modern data-storage platform, it probably wouldn't have taken 7.5 million years to find the answer. Today's computers could take a ...