Wanna carry 50,000 full length movies in your wallet?

Ever since the dawn of modern computing in 1945 or so when Eniac filled an entire room, we have been trying to make the computer smaller. The first revolution in shrinking came in the 1950’s when tubes were replaced by transistors made mainly of silicon. Then in the early 1960’s these transistors were replaced by MOS, and MOSFET , metal oxidizing semiconductors (field effect transformer) These where made of silicon and germanium) Other esoteric materials have been developed and used since, with no drastic reduction in size. Until now. Now we have begun to explore an even smaller material, the atom itself. What makes individual atoms or small clusters of several atoms useful to us in computing is all atoms have only two states, positive charged or negative charged, which fits in to our binary using systems. The problem we face today is reading and writing to these atoms. Currently, the only technology that can do this is a special tunneling microscope, which is impractical to use in personal computers or even business machines.
But another approach is to take silicon, and dope it with phosperous atoms. Data could then be encoded in the spins of the nucleus of the atom. Each electron around an atom can be manipulated like the needle on a compass. By applying an external magnetic force, the “compass needles” can be manipulated either in a “northern” (positive) direction, or “southern” (negative) direction. An Australian physicist named Bruce Kane, was able to read the net spin of 10,000 of these manipulated atoms together. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, because it takes 10k atoms to register. But by comparison, the previous efforts were only able to read 10 billion by a technique called magnetic resonance. This is a million fold improvement. I for one am excited at the possibility of 250 Terrabyte drives that are smaller than a credit card. Of course, our programs will get a lot more sophisticated and require a proportional amount of room, but the manipulation of this data will be astounding by our standards. The future in tech is always exciting, and I am very grateful to be alive during this time.