Cuneiform, the world's oldest form of writing, involved making indentations in clay tablets. Scientists have now developed a data storage system that'

Cuneiform-like data storage tech boasts four times the density of binary

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2025-01-01 14:30:03

Cuneiform, the world's oldest form of writing, involved making indentations in clay tablets. Scientists have now developed a data storage system that's like cuneiform on steroids – and it's capable of storing more data than a typical hard disc drive.

Instead of a clay tablet, the system utilizes an inexpensive polymer film composed of sulfur and a chemical compound known as dicyclopentadiene. Data is stored on that film in the form of a series of nanoscale indentations. These tiny indents are made (and read) using a fine-tip probe mounted on an atomic force microscope … not by a reed stylus.

In previous attempts at such "indent-based" data storage systems, the indents served as binary code. The presence of an indent represented a 1, while the absence of an indent represented a 0.

Not only were the polymer substrates that were used in these earlier systems difficult to produce, they also weren't very stable or finely workable. That's where the Flinders polymer comes in.