Optical vs Magnetic computing, black and white vs color television

Most people don't remember having only black and white television sets because color television sets are so cheap almost everyone owns one.

When I was a kid we had a black and white television and my mother didn't have a color set until I bought her one when I got out of the Army.

Computing today uses black and white technology, basically even worse than black and white television. At least black and white television had shades of gray. In computing today we have just black and white, a 2 bit system really.

We gather together groups of bits in clusters of 8, 16, 32 and 64 but these are only groups of 2 bit systems. On and off switches.

Optical computing offers the opportunity to bring to data what color television brought to home entrainment.

With optical computing you can store 10 gig of data in the same space we store 100K of data now.

The problem is producing the optical storage medium. Back in the seventies people used crystals. Now people are using proteins and nano-lasers. The newer technology can probably be commercialized within ten years.

In thirty years we will have optical data storage mediums that are so far advanced we can't even begin to understand them today.