by Shawn Schafer

Created on: January 31, 2009   Last Updated: June 14, 2009

As far as computers have advanced, one thing has remained constant: Everything eventually comes down to "0's and 1's". I believe this will not be the case forever.

At its core, every computer is a series of billions upon billions of electrical switches. The switches can either be "on or off", 1 or 0. But what if every switch could be 0,1, or 2? What would this mean. It would mean being able to store half again as much information with the same amount of matter. What if it was more than 3, what if it was 10? Or 100?

What my Intro to Computer Science teacher discussed briefly was the possibility of holographic memory. The basic concept of this is that data would be stored throughout the volume of disks rather than just the surface. This means more storage space in the same amount of matter, and a much faster transfer rate. Currently, only a bit can be transferred at once, on electromagnetic memory. This means that processor speeds, like 3 GHrz are how many times a bit is transferred per second. This speed would be 3 billion a second.

Now consider what this speed would mean with holographic memory. Holographic memory can transfer over 1 million bits at once. This means that 3 Ghrz would be over three million billion, 3,000,000,000,000,000 , 3 x10 to the 15th, or 3 quadrillion, however you prefer to say it; bits per second. Converted to current speeds, this would be 3 PHz(Peta Hertz). Basically, thats more than the current entire Internet, within about a minute. It also stands to reason that data storage would be multiplied by about the same ratio, so imagine a personal computer that can store 1,000,000 TB (1,000,000,000 GB for those of you unfamiliar with TB); this would be called an EB( Exabyte, 10 to the 18th bytes). We can also imagine that the amount of data stored on the Internet would grow by the same. The exact number for this is basically impossible to figure out, but the current is most likely over 500 EB. This means that the total data stored would be 500,000,000 EB, or 500 ZB(Zettabytes), a unit currently not even used. What the heck would take up this much space goes beyond the depth of this topic.

To me it would seem that the transfer rate is far more important than the space. Imagine being able to download a full length movie in a second. This of course goes beyond simply holographic memory and moves into the realm of "holographic bandwidth" or the equivalent. Or imagine your itunes collection of 1 billion songs stored on a holographic flash

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