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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Crystal Corn | ||
| Tiny data storage crystals. |
Forrester woke up in the future, after dying in a fire. His body was burned beyond recognition, but he had been frozen until medical science advanced enough to heal the damage.
Have any improvements been made? He goes to a "book store."
| I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century...
The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it... Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. My handful of crystal corn - my books. |
| From Return from the Stars,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Not known in 1961 Additional resources -
|
For another take on tiny data storage media, see the dime disk.
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| Twist Bioscience High Density Digital Data On DNA |
| Store One Bit On One Atom |
| DataTraveler Ultimate Generation 2 Terabyte Flashdrive |
| Sandisk 1 Terabyte SD Memory Card Surfaces |
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As far as the future is concerned 'they're the only experts we have'.
'The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles...'
'The planes flew continuously, twenty-four hours a day...'
'It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.'
'...a single perfectly level platform, which rose so high above the water that it was not splashed by the waves.'
'Is an extra-factual memory that convincing?' Quail asked.
