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To Our Readers

By John Flanagan

Saturday, April 17, 1999


You must
remember this

SAN Francisco -- Imagine picking up an individual atom, moving it a few millionths of an inch across a metal surface and putting it down wherever you choose. That's what Don Eigler is doing at IBM's Almaden Research Center, in the hills a few miles outside San Jose, Calif.

Eigler looks more like an artist or cowboy than a physicist. His presentation is not laden with formulae, theory and jargon. It is relaxed, simple, playful, joyous --almost religious.

On a computer screen, last Monday, he showed visiting newspaper editors how his scanning tunneling electron microscope not only pictures nickel atoms on a platinum surface but moves them at will.

It's as easy as pointing, clicking and dragging the mouse on a laptop PC -- in fact, that's what he uses. When he first got it working, he spent 22 hours spelling out "IBM" with a few dozen atoms, like angels dancing on the head of a pin.

We're still years from seeing this technology outside a lab. Eigler's atomic circus is supercooled almost to absolute zero, so his invention won't turn up in next year's ThinkPads. However, the implications of being able to arrange atoms in a desired order on a metal surface are huge -- and tiny.

That's what Almaden researchers do, find ways to cram ever huger quantities of digital data into tinier and tinier spaces. Eigler envisions an atomic disc drive the size of a postage stamp holding 2.5 Terabytes of data, sufficient to store literally every experience of a lifetime.

Imagine a tiny, wearable computer that creates a video record of everything you see and hear and can instantly "mine" that data to play back whatever you wish to recall. To demonstrate the usefulness of this vision Eigler says, "Suppose you're in a meeting and everyone else can remember what happened at the last one, except you."

For those memories you'd like to forget, we presume there will always be a Delete key.



John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.




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