Of all the stuff I've seen in sci fi movies and tv shows, I really didn't think the computer chips on glowing transparent plates was gonna become reality. What a crazy world this is.

"Project Silica’s goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change."

Very important note here.

Archeologist in 1000 years: "this glass has some interesting etching, must have had some religious significance.

Some of the same technology was actually also used to create windows.

Logs into the SilicaArk long term storage system for the first time.

“Welcome Andy, would you like to use the optimistic theme or the pessimistic theme?”

Chooses optimistic. Types in command to show storage capacity.

“The glass is half full.”

They're called isolinear chips.

Didn’t someone make a holographic cube some ten or so years ago with the same promises.

I never get excited by this stuff. If I see it in Best Buy, then I’ll believe it.

Awesome. So Microsoft, does this mean I'll finally get access to the other 3TB of OneDrive storage that I pay for on my family plan? Or do I still have to create random accounts that would simulate other family members in order to use it?

That's a lot of start menu ads and telemetry code!

Was it minority report or the matrix that showed humans storing data on glass?

Either way, this is pretty cool.

It seems like it would make for a great replacement for Tape Backups that are currently used for long term storage. They are easy to write to but hard to read from and restore. It'll probably be a great technology to put backups on especially if it lasts as long as they say. The challenge will probably come in with the specialized reading and writing laser / microscopes being expensive.

So I read many times that it can store "several TBs of data" but how many exactly? 2, 3, 5, 10?

Do they know exactly? Is it possible that they write 5 TBs and when they try to read it, they can only read like 3, losing the other 2 TBs?

MS: it can last for 10000 years!

Me: have you tested that

MS: well no b-

Me: your company is not even 50 years old

MS: but we ran the simulations

Me: ...

I really hate this like 'in my imaginary world, where everything is perfect and not as much as an atom of dirt comes into contact with the product, and therefore nobody uses the product while it is sealed in a vacuum chamber, then hypothetically it will still be good in a billion years. MTBF = infinity. ship it.'

I remember when they told us a CD would last for hundreds of years LOL

Is this what Hal 9000's memories were stored on?

Finally. I can store my porn in my glasses.

So... all the from Star Gate glass stuff might be quite accurate?

Is it durable just because it's thick, or can we use this tech in mobile screens too?

It's fairly easy to store data for a very long time. What's hard is remembering how to read that data after all that time.