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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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081792
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08179923.000
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 18HEALTH & SCIENCEIt's . . . Superdisk
A new technology could store War and Peace on a pinhead -- twice
over
Computer researchers are always vying to cram just a little
more information into a slightly smaller space. But a new
technology just announced by scientists at AT&T Bell
Laboratories may force the competition into playing catch-up for
a long time to come. They have found a way to squeeze up to 45
billion bits of data onto a square inch of disk space -- 300
times as much as an ordinary disk, and 100 times as much as the
most advanced magneto-optical technology. The system could put
two copies of War and Peace on the head of a pin.
More important, it could provide a way to store moving
pictures, which require large amounts of data, on conventional
compact discs, to be played back by computers or on television
sets. A palm-size disk could hold 17 hours of programming. It
works like other magneto-optical disks: a laser heats and
magnetizes the disk surface, then another laser reads the
magnetized spots. But while current systems use lenses to focus
the laser, this one funnels the light through an optical fiber
that has been stretched 1,000 times as thin as a human hair --
a much tighter focus than a lens can achieve. The main stumbling
block: the laser that reads these disks is too slow for
commercial applications, so far.