🚀 go-pugleaf

I first gave a talk which described using optical delay lines for data
storage in spring 1986 in Belgium and in The Netherlands. Following a
later talk which included this idea - I was ask by Dave Sincoskie of
BELLCORE if I had compared it to a disk, I had not at the time but
since have. This comparison and the limits to this technology are
described in a paper:

@Inproceedings[Maguire89c,
        Key=<Maguire>,
        Author=<G. Q. Maguire Jr. and P. R. Prucnal>,
        Title=<High-density optical storage using optical delay lines:
                Use of optical delay lines as a disk>,
        Organization=<SPIE - The International Society for Optical 
		      Engineering>\,
        Booktitle=<Medical Imaging  III>,
        Year=<1989>,
        Month=<January>,
        Volume=<1093>,
        Pages=<6 pages>
]

For those who are interested and can't wait for the proceedings, send
me e-mail and I'll mail you the PostScript version of this file (which
is 42173 bytes long). This file includes the diagrams.

I hope to find a student interested in building a prototype which will
act much like a SCSI disk (in having logical sectors), but with
considerably faster access time.

I anticipate a major application of this technology to be in local
swap space (as there are no moving parts and 500MB will fit within a 9
liter volume using a single frequency and much less volume if you
freq. multiplex - but you then increase the size and complexity of the
optics) and for image processing it makes an image from among 100T
bytes of image data available within 1 sec.

Chip