It takes a truly tech-savvy scientist to understand the awesome technology at play in your computer’s disk drive. For everyone else, there is one basic fact that remains clear. Since each generation of disk drives holds more information, whatever is representing that information must be getting smaller. IBM started making disk drives for computers in the early 50’s, and their researchers recently answered the question “How small can you go?” The smallest entity available to storage engineers is the atom, and by manipulating them in a 2-ton scanning tunneling microscope, they showed that one basic unit of information requires 12 atoms. Getting those atoms to do what you want is the next hurdle. Perhaps to show that they are not “all work and no play”, the IBM’ers used the same tools to make a film, certified by Guinness as the world’s smallest, named “A Boy and His Atom.”

http://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0