Ancestors

Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 16:14

WRT recent commentary on Spotify.

In the late 1980's colleagues at Thorn-EMI's Central Research Laboratories (CRL) invented a way of storing Terabytes of data using optical technologies https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0263656A3/en. (Brian Baker had developed some of the technology for telemetry of Space Shuttle launches).

At CRL we saw many implications of this (although, not distribution over WANs) and initiated a several projects. One was supported by the EU, but we had ZERO buy-in from EMI Music.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 16:38

Small coda to this.

The optical medium we had high hopes of was ICI's "digital paper". We weren't alone https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2019/07/24/history-1989-two-flexible-optical-drives-based-on-ici-digital-paper/.

However, in practice the samples we had did not look as if they'd last very long (e.g., delaminating in steamy conditions), and it didn't appear that ICI researchers had investigated these aspects properly. I didn't follow the story to the end because the research team broke up (suicide, redundancy, career change).

1/2

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Toot

Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 16:45

There was another optical storage tech promoted by an American guy whose name was perhaps similar to "Drexler". We'd looked at this with a view to storing personal medical records (with suitable data protection) & Brian had helped me one evening after chatting in the pub by pulling out all the current specs from his filing cabinet.

There was a club for companies interested in this tech with a joining fee of $100,000s. We got told for free by a guy from Maxwell's BPCC that it was useless.

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Descendants