Memory Blocks

The libraries in Thistledown city store information in cubes. Obviously, because Eon is science fiction, these cubes can contain vast amounts of information. This page explores how this is being done, in cubes.

A brief history of memory storage

The first tool that humans used for storing information was the human mind. The human mind is able to store, sort and retrieve huge amounts of information, the only problem is, if it doesn't think a piece of informaiotn is important enough, it throws it out, or if you believe Kevin Trudeau, it stores it somewher that we can't get at.
Eventually someone decided to use an information storage tool that kept all the information right where you put it, for a while at least. The first one of these was probably a bit of sand, then maybe a bit of mud, a cave wall, eventually we got to squashing bits of wood and dying it in intricate patterns.
Then came tapes, CDs, floppy and hard disks. Information that would have filled whole rooms could now be cept inside a small box. But now the world is become ever more hungry for smaller, faster memory, and although hard drives aren't doing a bad job, they can't keep it up forever.

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Memory blocks, the future of memory storage

Memory research is beginning to move from silicon back to carbon. Bacteria has been produced that can be easily switched from one state to another using a light signal. This is all that is needed for binary information storage. Because the bacteria reproduces itself, it will one day be far cheaper to manufacture than a hard drive or CD. It is perhaps a coincidence that these bacteria are already being placed into plastic cubes, so that they can be easily read and written to by a laser.

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