Dense and denser
Smarter tools for Web users
Not for your eyes only
Culture online
Hail, Fellows
XML Xperts
Dense and denser
In May, IBM set a new record for the amount of data that can be crammed onto a hard disk: 20 gigabits
per square inch (3.1 gigabits per square centimeter), or more than three times the density of
any disk-drive product shipping today. At this density, every square inch of disk space could
hold two TV-quality movies, two hours of MPEG-2 digital video, close to four CD-ROMs, or 2,500
average-sized novels. The milestone was achieved by a team of scientists and engineers from
IBM's Storage Systems Division, in collaboration with IBM Research.
| A magnetic force microscope reveals magnetic bits at the record density of 20 billion per square inch.
Above them for comparison are bits written at 6.4 billion per square inch, close to the previous record. |
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Over the past eight years, the average data storage capacity of disk drives sold worldwide has grown
more than 50-fold, while the price per unit of capacity has dropped nearly 300-fold. Robert Scranton,
director of recording head technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center, finds the new record an encouraging
sign of storage densities to come. "It shows that disk-drive capacities will continue to increase well into
the 21st century," he says.
Increasing data density will add capabilities to products that use tiny disk drives, enhance the use
of multimedia on desktop systems, and allow corporations to store more data in the same floor space.
The trend can also lead to disk drives that are lighter and more energy-efficient.
The 20-gigabit demonstration used a winning combination of IBM technologies, including an advanced
giant magnetoresistive read head (the most sensitive device for reading magnetic bits on disks),
a narrow-track thin-film inductive write head and ultralow-noise cobalt-alloy magnetic media.
Smarter tools for Web users
Aiming to give web developers and users more
control over the flow and customization of Web data, IBM has released a free Java™
-based software toolkit that enables a powerful new class of applications known as Web
intermediaries. These programs can monitor and modify the flow of Web data between clients, servers
and proxies. For example, they can produce personalized content, seamlessly connect local and remote
information on the Web, route Web traffic, translate protocols or document formats, and transcode data
for use on personal digital assistants and mobile phones.
The Web Intermediary (WBI, pronounced "webby") Developer Kit for Java, developed at
IBM's Almaden Research Center in cooperation with IBM's Network Computing Software Division, contains code
and application program interfaces for creating intermediaries. It also provides sample plug-in programs.
Personal History, for example, lets users find previously viewed pages, creates an "automated hotlist" of
the 200 pages visited most often, and adds shortcut links to pages based on previous browsing patterns.
Traffic Lights measures the connection speed to links displayed on a page, placing red, yellow or green dots beside
them to indicate that the speed is slow, medium or fast. Other plug-ins can filter pages to specify the sites to which
children or specified others have access, keep track of Yahoo!® category pages that are visited, and
translate file formats.
The WBI Developer Kit for Java can be downloaded from ,
alphaWorks®.
More information
Not for your eyes only
A web browser for blind people that was introduced
in Japan (see IBM Research, No. 3, 1998, p. 3) is now available in versions for English, French, German, Spanish
and Italian. The new Home Page Reader for Windows combines Netscape Navigator™ with IBM's ViaVoice™
Outloud U.S. English software to convert Web-based text to speech.
Users navigate with simple key controls. The original Homepage Reader was conceived by Tokyo Research Laboratory's
Chieko Asakawa, who is blind.
Culture online
The world's great museums are
fast shedding their image as isolated storehouses, and IBM Research
is speeding the trend along. As work proceeds on enhancing the online
presence of the Hermitage Museum in
St. Petersburg (see "Masterpieces on view,"),
IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory is helping to create a Global Digital Museum (GDM)
that will make the collections of several institutions available over the Internet
at a single online location.
| A Mayan stone lintel at the British Museum, as Osaka museumgoers will view it |
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Public trials of this virtual "megamuseum" will begin in September at the National Museum
of Ethnology in Osaka. Visitors will be able to use terminals to search for hundreds of
multimedia items from both the Japanese site and London's British Museum. Plans call for
the participation of other museums, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,
to explore worldwide use of the GDM on the Web.
Although many museums have put their collections online, the GDM will be the first project
to unite different museums under a uniform search format. Another innovation is a feature that
lets viewers create new combinations of objects from different museums and append notes to
objects interactively on the Web.
The system was developed jointly by the two museums in collaboration with IBM Japan and
Cornell University's Human-Computer Interaction Group in Ithaca, New York.
Hail, Fellows
In June, IBM announced that seven
of its top scientists, researchers and developers had been named IBM Fellows,
the company's most prestigious technical honor. They are: Tze-Chiang Chen
(IBM Microelectronics Division), driver of IBM's most advanced silicon chip
technologies; Irene Greif (Lotus Research), pioneer in the area of Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work (CSCW); Alex Morrow (Lotus Internet Applications Division),
contributor to fields ranging from programming languages and operating systems
to software standards, personal computer software and pervasive computing; Stuart
S.P. Parkin (IBM Research), materials scientist and developer of giant magnetoresistance
(GMR); Mir Hamid Pirahesh (IBM Research), standard setter in the field of database systems;
Gururaj S. Rao (IBM S/390 Division), key technical leader driving the evolution of IBM's
large high-end systems; and Nicholas Shelness (Lotus Communications Product Division),
world-class expert on messaging and groupware.
XML Xperts
Sharon Adler and Anders Berglund receive a welcome from IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner (center) upon joining the Extensible Technologies
group at IBM Research. The two researchers are leading authorities on markup
languages. They were instrumental in formulating the Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML) and Document Style Semantics and Specification Language
(DSSSL) specifications on which XML and XSL are based. Adler, now co-chair of
the World Wide Web Consortium's XSL working group, was vice-chair of the ISO
committee responsible for producing the SGML standard. Berglund was the project
editor of the well-known "Techniques for Using SGML" document (ISO 9573). At CERN,
he implemented an SGML-based publishing application that served as the foundation
for HTML. "The leadership that Adler and Berglund have shown, combined with their
considerable 'real world' experience in developing and deploying XML tools, will
contribute greatly to our already vigorous XML efforts," says Paul M. Horn, senior
vice president and director of Research.
