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To: Michael Olds who wrote (9559)	6/26/1999 4:47:00 PM
From: Michael Olds	Respond to of 17679

Brief selected quotes from Bob Scranton, Director of Recording Heads at IBM, interviewed in Maximum PC, July 99: Q: IBM's research team was the first to rearrange individual atoms on a substrate. Is IBM pursuing this as a storage medium or as the ultimate chip fab? A: Whenever somebody claims high storage density, you have to ask what the data rate was. Moving atoms around was probably a few bits per hour by the tiime you get your data in! There's another effect that occurs. It takes a certain energy to make the mark or to read the mark, and at some oint a mark is so small the energy can approach the ordinary vibration of atoms at room temperature. And then you have marks spontaneously appearing or disappearing. So in order to store these atoms on disk, you had to cool the entire surface down very close to absolute zero. And this is, today, not practical to carry around in your pocket. Q: What do you think is a good amount of time between a product demo and the actual product? A: We used to have six years between a demo and a product. Extrapolating a bit, we're seeing 18 months to two years. . . . It's indicative of how fast the industry is sucking technology in from the research labs.