Microsoft recorded 1978 Superman on a piece of glass

Microsoft held a conference for developers of Microsoft Ignite, during which introduced

interesting development - Project Silica.

What it is

This is a technology that allows you to usequartz glass for data storage. Infrared lasers encode data in glass, creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale lattices and deformations at various depths and at different angles. Data is encoded in “voxels,” the three-dimensional equivalent of pixels making up a flat image.

That is, unlike other optical media, data is not stored on the surface, but inside the glass. For example, a piece of glass 2 mm thick may contain more than 100 layers of voxels.

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To read information, the algorithm decodes patterns, and it can start from anywhere and from anywhere, unlike the same tape.

At the same time, quartz glass is very durable: it withstands maximum temperatures, for example, boiling in water or baking in the oven, exposure to microwave radiation, demagnetization and environmental influences, which are detrimental to other archives.

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Microsoft says this technology will workfor “cold” storage, when you need to save a large amount of data for a long time, but access to which will be extremely rare. For example, this is medical data, financial statements, legal documents, etc.

Already tested

Microsoft with Warner Bros. re-recorded the 1978 Superman movie. On a small plate measuring 75 × 75 × 2 mm, 75.6 GB of data fit instead of four film reels.

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By the way, the film company has huge archives of video and audio content. All this needs to be regularly rewritten and kept back up in different parts of the world.

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