Data storage has come a long way from the early days of computers. Long ago we had spools of tape and punch cards. Neither were particularly efficient. Soon we left those formats for rotating disks. Over time the bits on the disks got smaller, they spun faster, and have become the defacto standard for storing data. There are downsides to disks, paramount among them being a theoretical hard-limit on how small you can make magnetized areas that can reliably hold data and are still able to be read from and written to easily. To combat all that we turned to optics. Storing data with LIGHT! ...