Byron Dorgan: “I have been interested for some long while about new technology and the Internet and all those related issues. I recall…”

“I have been interested for some long while about new technology and the Internet and all those related issues. I recall reading a couple of years ago a statement by the former president of IBM in which he described the unbelievable leapfrog in technology and capability--most of it breathtaking. Most of us understand that because we use the Internet we can go anywhere in the world at our fingertips on the keyboard, but he described something breathtaking to me. He described the issue of storage density and the new capability of storage density. He said that we are on the cusp now of being able to reduce in storage density all of the works that exist in the Library of Congress--I think it is somewhere around 14 or 16 million volumes of work--which is the largest repository of human knowledge that exists anywhere on Earth; to be able to store that on a very small wafer the size of a penny. Think of that: a wafer the size of a penny representing the storage device that contains the largest repository of human knowledge in history.”