By now, most people have heard about the two European scientists who are sharing this year's Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in giant magneto resistance (GMR) in 1988.  It is this research that bumped the hard drive manufacturing community to the new technologies that we see as commonplace today.

It reminds me of an 1999 article I wrote for the EPCC newsletter that concluded, of the top 10 improvements in computing seen during EPCC's first 15 years, Duh! - large hard drives are the biggest, bestest thing which influenced our time.  It is also interesting to note how their scientific work moved from lab to household environments of 1999 in a scant ten years, and which is still seen in things like the iPod movement of this decade.

Once in a while, it is nice to have the rest of the world see what you see, huh?  So what predictions (or at the least, appreciations) should we make about the upcoming decades that EPCC will see?  More complicated web sites with AJAX interactivity and Web 2.0 additions ?  Off-site storage and off-site computing ? Software-as-a-service and software for free? Yes.  Webcams and You Tube and VoiceOverIP, Not so much.

http://www.axs2000.net/jvoris/Articles/Articles.1999/word0011.htm