Microsoft develops ultra durable glass plates that can store several TBs of data for 10000 years

Here, put this weird glowing crystal into the Heart of Gold's navicom, it contains the location of the long lost planet of Magrathea.

Star Trek predicts another future technology; the isolinear chip.

Add: And the chips used on the original series were opaque, but roughly the same size.

I bet people in the 80's said stuff like this when music started coming out on digital rainbow mirrors (CDs).

Isolinear chips have arrived.

I hope it'll be like those communicators in the expanse, those things look fun.

Optical communications, optical computers, optical storage.

Pfft just wait till we figure out Xenonite.

That's Glass-R but fot a few bucks more you can get a Glass-RW

So it's great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I'm interested in if it was cheap enough.

True, but being very easy to make would hopefully keep costs down, allowing you to have multiple plates.

Also, this may not be for home use but companies that need to store data for years.

"Bob, why the hell did you format this as 'Jim sux dicks'?! You know that's permanent, right?"

10K years later

Alien captain: Anything to report?

Alien: We need to find a being named "Jim", sir...

If the glass is nothing special, each piece would cost cents and be like burning CD's back in the day, except infinitely recyclable.

What's more important is the time and cost to read and write.

Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.

So its cd but fom the future

Turns out to be the lewd anthropomorphic creatures glass plate

Archaeologist in 1005 years: "We have translated the folder names on this glass storage device! The writings within refer to a important man named "Brazzers", and there is another folder full of his correspondence to his "step sister" and someone named "Milf".

"There is only the true religion of the Void, these heretic artifacts must be destroyed"

You can have my upvote, but I'm not happy about it

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Is that from Star Trek?

I have pendrives that look almost like that.

Many people have made such devices I think. There's probably a guy somewhere with a shelf full of them.

Yeah, also writing 10 GB of data to rolls of sticky tape in the late 90s. It can be done, but it's not practical.

Sure, if you don't mind storing stuff and then never reading them again.

This plan it built under the assumption that more people will be using one drive. The value of scrapped data isn't just quantity, but number of people.

I almost literally yawned reading the title. "Journalists" regurgitating things they don't understand and hyping them everytime like it's the breakthrough of the century. I feel it waters down actual breakthroughs and makes people immune or at least apathetic to these stories because it's the same thing over and over.

It's working!

The goddamn telemetry code!!! Is ancient!! That's why it's so huge and slow

10,000 TB of cat pics.

Minority Report had some glass storage stuff that was fun to see. He would insert a glass slide into the machine.

Star Trek also has this.

in The Expanse their ships are somehow powered/controlled by a shelf of things that look like this

I think the blade runner sequel had something like this too.

I think you're thinking of Star Wars. Like episode 2 or something.

In 2001, HAL is disconnected through glass like components.

I don't remember this anywhere in the matrix

According to the article, they're using their AI cloud service to decode the data, so it's also likely so computationally expensive to decode that it won't be practical. Seems more like a gimmick to woo investors that won't actually ever see real world use, at least not any time soon. I suppose you could make the argument that you can back up data on it now, and hope reading it becomes more practical later, but then it's more of a supplement to tape backup, rather than a replacement.

They're being so vague with the numbers that I really doubt how mature any of this is. Given some of the examples (photos, music, War & Peace) I'm guessing 3TB or so, but it's a fluff article, so who knows.

Just out of curiosity, I calculated that the article's (War and Peace * 875,000) claim would net you less than 1TB of storage space (~973GB), assuming it was GZipped (and ~3x that if not).

The most concrete number we have is from another article (also on an official Microsoft page) that claims it's upwards of 7TB.

I imagine it would depend on the size of the plate and the degree to which correcting codes are used for redundancy.

Right? I had a similar question about this - what happens when it scratches?

Don't forget Isolinear Chips.

They'll be able to use generative AI on a dick pic to reconstruct your conscious, make you feel embarrassed, then delete you again

You can make a jar out of this glass, the good ending.

• You'll have your porn literally in you

If into my Hentai coasters you go, only pain will you find.

You could use like 10% of the storage to have a pictogram that explains how to read the data.

And also remembering what passphrase your ancestors used.

You make a good point, and it's funny.

But we can make estimates for the endurance of various materials from today. And we know the limitations of most of our media is quite short. So having something that's predicted to last a while is still a good thing, even if we don't have empirical evidence yet.

Ignoring physical damage, by being crushed or said on fire. We know that some materials are not inherently stable. Like they haven't reached their final molecular state. Especially in the presence of oxygen or other catalysts.

Papers a great example, a lot of paper, and a lot of ink used on paper can be acidic degrading the paper over time. So we know that what's printed today, the vast majority of it, is not going to last very long. Just because of the acid ignoring all the other issues with paper and rot etc.

So if they have some stable glass material that can encode data, and is in molecular steady state, so it doesn't want to degrade on its own. That changes the problem from how do you prevent this material from reacting to its own environment, to how do you prevent this material from being manually destroyed. It's a different problem, but it's an easier problem

I get where you're coming from, but I also think it's fair to say archaeologists have at least some insight into what happens to glass over long periods of time. Hopefully Microsoft has consulted with them.

Bruh, it’s quartz glass. Tf you think is going to happen to it?

Just some real world experience:

Many, but not all books made of paper have survived the last world war. I'm not so sure about all the glass plates.

I don't think it's that type of "durable." I think they mean you can read from it forever without having to rewrite the data, which currently isn't true of platter and solid state storage. This isn't screen technology, though, it's storage technology, so I'm not sure the comparison is useful.

Kill itself

Universe ends.

Cleaning crew finally finds a way to make the glass clean.

Maybe if we build it for ourselves. Looks beautifully simple. The encoding is probably a little trick but we can get there.

Just need a laser that can make marks in glass at different depth.

WORM: Write Once, Read Many.

You can write to it.......

once

Data is data, you could store anything there. The question is if this would eventually reach some sort of consumer market. By the looks of it it's in a very early stage (where all equipment to read and write is still in RnD phase) so it's not where you can have a sata cable attached to it in your pc.

Nobody uses a 6502 with commodore basic anymore either, I can still pop on an emulator in about 10 seconds to run a game from that era.

Have some information there to build a reader, we can read hieroglyphics and cuneiform and that's older, more primitive and only written in a few places by a few people.

This is pretty doable.

I want to know how many times they had to test it before they found one that lasted so long

If you want something to last 1000 years you design it to last 10k. In 1000 years, the descendants of the ultra rich will come out of their bunkers with the technology to read these chips.

The question is will it be because we've advanced so far beyond that level of computing, or because we've had WW3 and are back playing with rocks and fire?

Article says the glass plates can only be written once, so don't toss out your hdd just yet

Wdym? Your user's personal info and data is the most important thing to archive, isn't it? /S

I mean, we have people that are able to read Mayan writing...

You should look into message sent off world from Arecibo space telescope. It's super interesting how scientists made the messages universally readable with assumption whoever gets it has never spoken a word of any of our languages.

If we know that the material can go 10k years without degradation, which is something we can know, then it can last that long. Will it be practically possible to store it in a way that will allow for the maximum amount of time before the material begins to degrade? That's a whole other thing.

0.1% of the intended storage duration?

Given the 20 years of development between the first VTR and VHS, the 100% development to storage lifetime of that technology seems pretty large in comparison.

Also, how silly would it be if we put things into glass for 10,000 years and then 5 years later there's a format war like VHS vs Beta and we need to redo everything?

Intelligent life in the future will find 10,000 year old records from present day humanity and be so frustrated by the multiple competing formats over the first 100 of those years that they won't even bother trying to read it.

Of all the things to take time with to get right, extremely long term storage seems like one of the more prudent.