I've mentioned the Rosetta system in several of my digital preservation
presentations. It was developed by Los Alamos National Laboratories and
commercialized(?) by Norsam Technologies. It uses an ion beam to etch data
into the surface of very hard metals such as nickel or titanium. Depending
on how dense the data is written, it can be read using an optical or
electron microscope and claims a lifespan of 2000+ years.
It is being used today in the aforementioned Rosetta project to catalog the
world's languages, particularly those in danger of being lost. But it's
quite expensive and not *really* commercialized in the sense that you will
see it at Best Buy in the foreseeable future. In addition, it's only really
useful for analog - in other words, it's basically super high density
microfilm. The reason, as I've also noted in my presentations, is that media
lifespan is the least of the three major digital preservation issues. The
more pressing issues are hardware obsolescence and software
incompatibility/obsolescence - how would you read what's on that nickel disk
in 2,000 years if it's Word 2007? Word 5? WordStar? Etc.

Cheers,

Jesse Wilkins
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blog: http://informata.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins

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