burning tiny pits into them. Recently released Toshiba, the first commercial optical disks can store the equivalent of 33 books of 300 pages each; but they offer a "sluggardly" retrieval time of half a second. Optical disks have one other serious drawback: They cannot be amended or rerecorded.
The most promising micromemory technology, as Douglas sees it, involves making silicon chips "superconducting"~cuttingtheir resist- ance to the passage of electricity by bathing them in...