h a l f b a k e r yA riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a rich, flaky crust
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I have in my hand a piece of plastic with two Jupiter Ace
programs on it - Missile Man and Space Fighter Pilot if
you're interested. It is of course a cassette, containing a
reel of magnetic tape. It occurs to me that a Micro-SD
card, being 15 mm long, 11 mm wide and one millimetre
thick,
is of a size which lends itself to being stuck on a
strip of slightly wider tape. A reel of tape one millimetre
thick with a diameter of five cm and a central wheel 2 cm
in diameter would consist of around sixty-five such units,
with a total capacity of around a terabyte. Whereas it
would be possible just to do this with a strip of cards stuck
to a tape, I also imagine that they could be packed in more
easily if one forgoes some of the packaging. Alternatively,
800-odd could be placed on a vinyl disc the size of an LP.
To read them, er...
OK, to read them, place them edge on and have them
kerchunk into a thingy, and in fact, tell you what, just
have a disc studded with them arranged edge-on and you
get a capacity of around six terabytes minimum single-
sided.
Flexible electronics
http://www.nature.c.../full/nmat3759.html
As mentioned in an annotation. [Vernon, Nov 16 2013]
gravity-powered tic-tac-toe-playing computers made of tinker toys
http://www.retrothi...he_tinkertoy_c.html
As mentioned in an annotation [CraigD, Nov 16 2013]
[link]
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So not actual analogue tapes and LPs, miniaturised to the size of a SD card? |
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Well, you could go that way too but that's not where
I've gone this time. |
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Considering recent efforts to develop fully-flexible
electronic stuff, the Idea of combining a lot of small
flexible segments into an overall "tape" is not far-
fetched. |
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Rather than having moving parts, wouldn't it make
more sense to have all the microSD cards
electrically connected to a controller that would
switch between them as needed electronically? Since they usually contain multiple flash memory
chips, this is essentially what ordinary *SD card
are. as are larger solid state disc drives. |
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This idea is from one POV for a card-switching
robot, from another, for a very slow (on the order
of 10,000,000 times seek time) SSDD. While robots
are fun and cool as amusements in and of
themselves, I don't think many folk find very slow
storage devices much fun. |
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I put the idea in a category between practical and
novelty like gravity-powered tic-tac-toe-playing
computers made of tinker toys (a must-see stop
on my geek's Boston tour guide) - fun to watch a
few times, but not something you'd want to use
often. |
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There are advantages to having data storage physically disconnected from the computer, e.g for securing backups from malicious software. |
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This is Indeed not a terribly practical suggestion, hence its location
here rather than in a patent application. |
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Any idea is improved by having them kerchunk into a thingy, I'll grant you that. |
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[pertinax], you just made me cry with laughter, probably because I've
blancmanged my brain. |
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