Digital Data Written in Stone The "Digital Rosetta Stone" would
store data and give wireless access to it for 1000 years 17 June
2009—What do data archivists have in common with monarch
butterflies, salmon, and most geese? They are always preparing
for their next migration. From magnetic tape through hard disks,
floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray, digital data formats
change periodically, forcing archivists to migrate their data
before obsolescence or end-of-lifetime sets in. But now Tadahiro
Kuroda, a research engineer and professor at Keio University, in
Yokohama, Japan, and his team have come up with a device that
could put an end to this recurring—not to mention
costly—upheaval in data preservation by maintaining the data
safely in an unchanging format that’s predicted to last 1000
years. The device is a permanent memory system based on
semiconductor technology. The prototype consists of four stacked
300-millimeter silicon wafers incorporating 2.5 terabits, (320
gigabytes), of data encoded on read-only