Ask Slashdot: What Happened To Holographic Data Storage?

dryriver writes: In an episode of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World broadcasted all the way back in 1984, a presenter shows hands-on how a laser hologram of a real-world object can be recorded onto a transparent plastic medium, erased again by heating the plastic with an electric current, and then re-recorded differently. The presenter states that computer scientists are very interested in holograms because the future of digital data storage may lie in them. This was 35 years ago. Holographic data storage for PCs, smartphones, etc. still is not available commercially. Why is this? Are data storage holograms too difficult to create? Or did nobody do enough research on the subject, getting us all stuck with mechanical hard disks and SSDs instead? Where are the hologram drives that appeared “so promising” three decades ago?

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Source:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/11/19/2356238/ask-slashdot-what-happened-to-holographic-data-storage?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed