Over the years, our storage medium has constantly shifted and evolved, where we would use huge magnetic tapes to backup data back in the day, before moving onto floppy disks, optical disks, and these days, flash storage seems to be a pretty popular medium. However, it seems that Microsoft might have come up with a new medium for the future in the form of glass.
Dubbed Project Silica, this concept was recently shown off by the company where they showed off a piece of glass that stores the original 1978 Superman movie. This is a very interesting concept and according to Microsoft, it requires the use of machine learning algorithms to decode the contents of it.
For those wondering about the fragility of such a storage medium, Microsoft seems to have thought of that. The company claims that this glass storage medium can be boiled, baked in an oven, thrown in a microwave, demagnetized, and so on, but the data on it will remain unaffected. This has the potential of keeping data on it for thousands of years.
That being said, it is unclear when we might actually see this glass storage medium become a reality. It is still largely a proof of concept at this point in time, so we probably shouldn’t expect to see it for a while, if at all.