February 10, 2000

6:17 PM

IBM has developed a new storage technology called Millepede which has more in common with old-school punch cards than it does with magnetic hard drives. The system uses a tiny heated sensor to mark a thin polymer layer, and can already store 400 gigabytes per square inch. And it will improve. Will we ever have enough important information to fill up such ridiculous amounts of space?
posted by sixfoot6 (4 comments total)

All I want to know is if that trick where you shoot the Millipede right when it comes out onto the screen still works. You see, it puts a mushroom right in the way and then you can shoot the rest of the Millipede pretty easily and rack up big points.
posted by jkottke at 8:32 PM on February 10, 2000

You'd think. Unfortunately, what it does is it causes 400,000,000,000,000 millipedes to instantly flood the screen. You can rack up a lot of points, but the game only lasts about 2.2 seconds.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 9:44 PM on February 10, 2000

What no one could have possibly predicted is that shooting the DDT pellets only makes things worse for this type of storage. IBM engineers who chose to eat the mushrooms rather than shoot them have discovered an nth complexity infinite binary loop in one of the level 4 spiders that erases all high scores recorded as indentations on the plasma film itself. Is it any wonder that IBM is losing its market share? They're still pushing that giant palm-of-your-hand trackball pointing device! I'll stick with my Pong Controller when I'm working with Lotus spreadsheets, thank you very much.
posted by sixfoot6 at 10:44 PM on February 10, 2000

Back to the posting (sorry guys), I think it means that the following version of Windows to be released will arrive on a set of 10 CDs (or 4 DVDs, your choice).
posted by othermatt at 1:23 AM on February 12, 2000