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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JRI who wrote (7330)	8/5/1999 9:07:00 PM
From: Boplicity	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 17183

Could some please explain the bold section in the following news article. IBM Develops Way to Store Data 1,000 Times Faster Get Quote, Company Info: IBM from Bloomberg News ARMONK, N.Y. (Aug. 5)-- International Business Machines Corp., the world's largest computer maker, has developed a way to store information 1,000 times faster than possible with today's technology using roughly half the power. IBM's advance, which is still at an early stage and won't be available in storage products anytime soon, will be published tomorrow in Science magazine, a trade journal. In each of the last two years, manufacturers have doubled the amount of information that can be stored in a given space while speeding up the rate that it's recorded by 40 percent. That progress is limited by today's technology, though, because tightly packing information ultimately slows how fast it can be stored. IBM said it's found a way to overcome that barrier. ''We were facing a brick wall,'' said Dieter Weller, an IBM research staff member and co-author of the Science article. ''Now we understand the physics.'' IBM rose 4 11/16 to 123 3/16. Storage systems have become a more important part of computer networks with the surging use of the Internet, which gives businesses and consumers access to large amounts of previously untapped information. ''The Internet is the big motivator here. There's so much more information people need to store,'' Weller said. Storage Innovations IBM, based in Armonk, New York, long has been a leader in developing innovations for storage systems. In May, the company said it had set a world record by storing 20 billion bits of information within a square inch. A month later, IBM began shipping the world's smallest computer hard-disk drive, which is the size of a quarter. The company's advance in speeding up the storage process involves flipping the positive and negative charges of a magnetic field as quickly as possible. The charges translate into a series of zeros and ones -- binary code -- that represent the information on a storage system. In an experiment described in the Science article, IBM researchers emitted a small burst of power for two trillionths of a second to form a magnetic field. On its own, the field then flips the charges. ''All we do is trigger the reversal,'' rather than forcing it with more power, Weller said. IBM still must overcome major hurdles before the technology can be used in hard drives, tape storage systems and floppy disks, Weller said. The researchers conducted the experiment using a recording head that extends 2 miles underneath Interstate 280 in California. ''There are ways of circumventing Highway 280,'' but they'll take time to develop, he said 2 miles I don't get it. Greg