It's a little far from the usual topics I cover here, but I thought I'd mention an article of mine on holographic data storage that has just come out in SPIE's quarterly magazine this month. The subject is not completely unrelated to building intelligent systems, as I mentioned in a previous post, but I'm not going to pretend that the work covered in the article is at the heart of the subject.
The reason that the article is special to me is not only that the subject is technically interesting, but it also marks an important anniversary in my career. It was on 19 October 1987 that I published the first issue of Holographics International magazine. Since then, holography has gone through many ups and downs and, though my interests have moved more towards intelligence (artificial and otherwise) and related subjects, I've always tried to keep an eye on what was going on the field. It's extremely nice, on my 20th anniversary of covering the field, that I'm able to report on some good news: holographic data storage is now real... you can actually buy disks and drives. I won't say much more about the article itself, but I hope you find it informative.
Also, you might be interested to look at the Holographics International web page: over the next eight weeks I'm going to put up all the old issues of the magazine, starting with the first issue, as PDF files. Reading or skimming the series will perhaps tell you as much about the journey of a writer and editor learning her skills as it does about the history of holography in the late 1980s. Nevertheless I hope you find it interesting.
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