To Be Fully Informed[ldots].

People ask me why they should read trade publications, like Computer Technology Review, when they already read newspapers, computer-user magazines, or the business press that cover technology so well. What I answer is this: If you don't read trade journals, especially those from outside your own particular field, you may be cutting yourself off from new developments that could impact your business.

Look at what's happening with digital camera "film," for example. For several years, I've covered the rivalry for design-wins among three solid-state storage alternatives: SanDisk's CompactFlash, Toshiba's SmartMedia, and Sony's MemoryStick. The first is the market leader and offers the highest absolute capacities; the second is physically smaller and slightly less expensive per megabyte; while the third can plug directly into other Sony products such as laptops.

If you own a camera store or get work as a photographer, you have to confront those choices all the time, but even if you're just a snapshot-shooter, you ought to read CTR. So you'll know why the price of semiconductor memories, unlike rotating memories such as HDDs cannot fall very far or very fast. (Answer: The chip-making process doesn't produce high yields and packaging those chips is pretty much a fixed cost.)

The newest digital camera from Olympus takes both SmartMedia (which it has always shipped with) and CompactFlash cards. In PC Magazine, columnist John Dvorak says Olympus is hedging its bets and will soon switch over to the better-selling medium, but as I've reported in CTR, third-party card-reader peripherals invariably have slots for both types of media. So it seems to me that Olympus is simply trying to sell a "next" or "second" camera to people who already have experience with one and I say this because the issue of investment protection through backward-compatibility is a perennial in the trade press. It is not typically covered in end-user publications, which tend to focus on what's "new" and to drop coverage of anything that smacks of being "old."

That's not to say that PC or any other end-user pub isn't worth reading. I'm an end-user too and I've subscribed to PC since its inception 18 years ago (I was also among the first contributors), but it's the trade press that gives you heads-up stories about technology. In 1999, CTR had the first in-depth reports about IBM's miniature HDD called MicroDrive and, to take this example full-circle, the MicroDrive--as I predicted last year--is now being offered as a storage option on some "pro-sumer" (i.e., more expensive) digital cameras. The only angle I didn't anticipate last year is that those cameras also take SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards. Talk about investment protection!

All this is my way of leading into the May 2000 issue of Scientific American, which has a lengthy and well-illustrated article by Jon William Toigo, headlined "Avoiding A Data Crunch." His focus is the superpara-magnetic effect-- which I've been reporting on in CTR for two years already. (You remember the superpara-magnetic effect, don't you? That's what happens when toe many recorded magnetic "spots" crowd together on a disk's surface: They destabilize each other's polarities, which makes the error-rate too high for data accuracy.)

The author writes books about storage and his grasp of the problem is quite firm: How can storage capacity go up if you can't boost areal density? He reports that the onset of the effect has been pushed farther away by researchers at IBM and HP, among others and he also stresses that real breakthroughs, on an order-of-magnitude scale, will come about only from new recording technologies and media.

Yet surprisingly, he doesn't go into detail about how the superpara-magnetic effect has been overcome so far. He briefly covers how read/write circuitry has gotten more sensitive in the move from thin-film heads to Magnetoresistive (MR) heads and the even more rapid adoption of Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) heads, but most of the article is about laboratory experiments, all of which have been reported on in CTR. The difference is we don't generally dwell on them because they've been stuck in the blue sky for years and years and have yet to generate a single manufacturable alternative to today's magnetic, magneto-optical, or phase-change storage devices and our readers work in the real world.

Much is made, for example, of TeraStor's solid-immersion lenses, but only one sentence notes that, after five years, this approach still has "various technical kinks." Similarly, Toigo reports that Seagate is looking for more thermally stable (he calls them "harder") recording media. We've covered this effort too at Quinta (which Seagate owns) and have said all along what Toigo eventually acknowledges: That commercial products won't be ready for four more years.

He also devotes space to research that's even farther from fruition. TeraStor, in another project, is trying to fabricate "mesas and valleys" on a disk's flat surface to keep magnetic data spots physically apart, but such tiny sizes impose big manufacturing headaches. Two competing research consortia are working with holograms, but none has gotten off the lab bench and into a prototype. The problem there, of course, is how to store, retrieve, and rewrite data in three dimensions instead of two and Toigo says that data storage at the level of atomic resolution--the way IBM and HP "draw" their corporate logos by pushing atoms around--is at least a decade away.

Don't let this dissuade you from reading the article. I've subscribed to` Scientific American, on and off, since I was a boy and I often follow its rhetorical style in my own writing when I explain technology to non-technical people or explain one technical specialty to specialists in other fields. I learned some new things from Toigo's piece and I'm sure practically everyone else will too. I just want to emphasize that most of this information ran in CTR before it got to Scientific American and, in the news business, that's called a scoop.