April 11, 1995

Can someone tell me what the breakthrough is? I do not see in the press release
the news of any new work. The use of STM's to store data at very high densities
is well known, see, for example, "Technology of Proximal Probe Lithography" by
Christie Marrian (ed.), SPIE IS10, 1993.

Also, since they say they can scan an area 1 x 1 um, but it takes a micro-
actuator 100 x 100 um to do this, the utilization of the storage medium is only
1/10,000 -- very, very inefficient. Also, the data rate, as the press release
noted is very (very) slow, so it will take thousands of such probes running in
parallel to give the data rate of current disk drives.

-- Steve Morton, Oxford Computer, Inc., Oxford, CT