IBM’s Millipede has been due to start replacing flash memory for the past two years, according to everyone from pundits to the company itself, but seems to have ongoing problems crawling out of the lab. Of course IBM’s sell off of its data storage business to Hitachi have left the project somewhat stranded.
IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article on the development of scanning probe technologies, contrasting the superstar physicists at IBM with the trials and tribulations of Nanochips Tom Rust. While it may be making use of a variety of nanoscale phenomena, readers to whom the term Winchester Disk is familiar may also remember feeding mainframe computers with punch cards or ticker tape which is essentially the same technology (we have non too fond memories of monstrosity known as The Burroughs which occupied an entire building and whose main function seemed to be to alert would be programmers to syntax errors in line one).