Random Note: Increasing Digital Memory Density

Note To The Granddaughters

As mentioned over the past few days, I am really enjoying George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral, c. 2012.

I don't understand much of the technical stuff, but I'm getting better. It will be exciting to go through middle school, high school, and university with you so I can learn electrical engineering which I did not learn the first time going through life.

It is incredible how things developed with regard to the computer. When John von Neumann and friends were developing the computer back in the 1940's, from the very beginning, they divided coding into two major units: computation and storage. And that's the way it remains today.

It has been incredible to see how much memory "they" are now able to put on small SanDisks, for example, but here's a short video to show how researchers are looking to increase even that amount of memory density.

At the video, listen carefully at 2:15. The researcher says it takes one million atoms to store one byte of memory. In the technology at the video, the researcher says they can store one byte, or one unit, of memory using twelve -- repeat, twelve -- atoms.