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Beyond binary

Last week my wife bought another armful of lever-arch ring binders in which to file more of the endless stream of paperwork that surrounds here association with ACC, medical specialists and others involved in the fallout from her accident.

Over the past two and a half years, we have collected a mountain of letters, forms, reports, notes, rulings and other printed material - plus x-rays, scans and the like.

In the corner of the living room there are three large cardboard boxes, filled with folders, ring-binders and pouches -- each bulging at the seams with this stuff.

On the weekend I was fiddling around with an 8GB microSD memory card, removing it from a keychain camera and placing it into a card-reader so as to extract some of the video and still images from it.

Join the dots...

As I stood with the microSD card in-hand, I looked at the ever-growing mountain of dead-tree flesh in the corner and realised just how far we've come with digital memory storage.

The memory card was smaller than your fingernail but had the capacity to store about 2 million single-spaced A4 pages of text -- orders of magnitude more than was currently residing in those bulky boxes.

Gosh, I recall when a single 1KB EEPROM chip was not only expensive but also *huge* in comparison to the far smaller microSD with 8 million times as much capacity.

Just how on earth do they cram so much data into such a tiny space?

Well the job is becoming increasingly hard and researchers are already reaching the level of miniaturisation where quantum effects may start causing issues.

Unfortunately, our need for digital memory continues to grow in parallel with our need for ever-faster processors and ever more complex software.

At some stage, perhaps only a decade or two away, even today's existing memory technologies won't be adequate for our needs -- so where to from here?

Well it could be that we have to dispense with memory based on binary data.

Work is now being undertaken to create memory chips that store data using more than two logic states.

Instead of storing your data as a combination of 0's and 1's, this new memory technology will use perhaps three states -- or more, in order to significantly increase the density of data.

Trinary memory would instantly increase the capacity of a given number of storage cells by 50% -- a memory cell capable of storing 10 states would lift memory storage by a whole order of magnitude, etc, etc.

Perhaps the next step after this would be trinary processors, built around similar "bigger than binary" technology.

I'm absolutely sure this will come to pass -- once we've used up the other avenues for increasing the scale of existing binary computer technologies.

Back to the box of paperwork in the corner of the living room...

Every time someone new wants a copy of our records, we have to spend an inordinate amount of time photocopying, collating and presenting significant excerpts of those papers so we've decided to scan them all. Once this is done, a 2GB USB drive or a DVDR will contain everything required and can be duplicated in just a few minutes at a cost of must a few dollars.

I love technology!

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