this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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It never ceases to amaze me how far we can still take a piece of technology that was invented in the 50s.
That's like developing punch cards to the point where the holes are microscopic and can also store terabytes of data. It's almost Steampunk-y.
That's how most technology is:
Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.
Solid state is kinda like a microscopic punch card.
More like microscopic fidget bubble poppers.
When the computer wants a bit to be a 1, it pops it down. When it wants it to be a 0, it pops it up.
If it were like a punch card, it couldn’t be rewritten as writing to it would permanently damage the disc. A CD-RW is basically a microscopic punch card though, because the laser actually burns away material to write the data to the CD.
They work through electron tunneling through a semiconductor, so something does go through them like an old punch card reader
So are optical discs
Much more so than solid state.