Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Martin Kunze
I want to say exactly what we are doing at the moment. It would be good to get the first systems done. I would say, right Steffen?
Steffen Hellmold
Yes!
Interviewer
Can you describe a little bit about what you’re doing?
Martin Kunze
I first started to write analog information on ceramics, on plates, like bathroom tiles, with a digital print of ceramic toner. The limitations were that it was analog, only text and images. Storing music in an analog way for example would be possible in some way, but certainly not in the quality you would have on digital. I started to make vinyls from porcelain, but that didn’t really work well. This is when I started to think about creating CDs made from silicate material. The original CD format is a kind of hybrid digital analog. It’s just a row of numbers chronologically of the distance between the baseline and the pitch, and this is 16 bits represented in zeros and ones. There’s no compression in it. If you explain how to read a CD to a future society with no access at all to a CD player, you can just define, this is 44,100 times a second, this is 16-bit reconstructing the analog wave. You start in the middle because the spiral is clear, you can define the second with the free fall to explain how to read the CD. It’s a one-pager. It’s not the manual on how to build the CD player. To those who can decode this and transform this into analog waves, they will have their engineers. And if we would find something today, I think, this manual on how to read a CD, it wouldn’t be even a master’s thesis, I think, to build a device with these instructions.
So this was the idea- to store digital information in an analog archive. To get much more intense information, like video, you must create some digital information carrier. This is how it started, actually, to use thin ceramic materials, femtosecond lasers, to write information in a durable way, and also to retrieve information from these ceramic surfaces. Then we had to find the right people with the technical knowledge and also the understanding of how to make a business case out of it, and not just an art project. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have the funding to get it done. So we founded Cerabyte, collected seed funding, built the first working prototype made of parts off the shelf, which worked, but of course the parts didn’t work so well together. They’re not created to work together. And this is what we are doing right now, building the whole system from zero, but knowing what we are doing and designing the components for best performance, best density, how to divide the stack to get random access to data and how to write and to read fast.
So a lot of money would help get this done faster.
The question is the other way around. How do you get a business out of something which you think should last for thousands of years?
Steffen Hellmold
While we have the starting point with lasers, the ultimate scale would be similar to making silicon chips today with a semiconductor manufacturing process, if you could use and leverage this entire foundational infrastructure, you could write information onto glass in a very enduring way. Keep in mind that semiconductor chips last much longer than they may operate. So when you think about that, that’s truly the integral part in how you make storage a part of the overall high-tech ecosystem.
Interviewer
What is it like starting and designing and running a business that has a much longer term trajectory than a lot of firms in the business world? The business you’re involved in has a horizon that is much further out than normal, how does that influence or change how you make decisions?
Martin Kunze
Well, I would say it started as an art project or cultural project with the time perspective of a time horizon of hundreds or thousands of years.
There is a track record of thousands of years on Babylonian cuneiform tablets. The solution was already there, it’s ceramics. This is just a modern form. And seeing the need to leave something permanent, because digital records will not endure. So probably the question is the other way around. How do you get a business out of something which you think should last for thousands of years?
Steffen Hellmold
I think something that a lot of people are very familiar with is having a long term vision. While you’re seeking to do something greater for mankind, you have to find economic digestible milestones that you can iterate yourself towards that long term goal. You somehow have to create value along the way, in order to sustainably and continuously secure additional funding for the work that you do. In a market driven economy, you have to find someone that you can convince, who will provide the capital for that.
Interviewer
I’m curious what it’s like to have to educate and explain what for many people is a new type of media format that they may not be familiar with. What is the process like for explaining a new storage format that you are creating from scratch?
Martin Kunze
This is why we chose to have some form factors adapted from tape libraries, or using QR codes in our demo system. It’s hard to describe something which does not exist yet, because there is nothing like it. But there are bits and pieces.
Steffen Hellmold
With the media I always like to say it is like cuneiform tablets shrunk down to the nanoscale or like ceramic punch cards at nanoscale. People can connect to that. When you think about the writing process, this is like maskless lithography, right? This is how you edge or you write a semiconductor. At least in the tech world, people can connect to that. So you need to break down the technology into parts that you can anchor in something that people are familiar with because otherwise they don’t know where to start.
Martin Kunze
And it depends really on who we are talking to and what’s the specific background. If someone is not familiar with the topic at all, I will start to explain that today’s media has a limited lifetime. The disks installed in 2019 are now being dismissed or discarded or commissioned. According to the numbers of drives which were delivered or shipped in 2019, there are 600,000 hard drives per single day that need to be decommissioned. People understand it’s very unsustainable. And then I say we are making something which doesn’t need to be replaced.Mark Lantz, who we also spoke with, has dedicated much of his career to incrementally evolving a technology that was always intended for long term storage: tape.
Steffen Hellmold
You’ve got to find the anchor point to your audience. We have a media that is useful for digital preservation, but also enables AI, because it’s accessible capacity storage. Now, the problem is that both of these audiences cannot be addressed with the same message. And that’s why we had to come up with the split tagline of saving the past and enabling the future. To try to build that bridge. This is the other problem that we’re facing is when you have the broadest possible use of what you’re developing, how do you touch all the audiences and make sure they can connect to that? Because in the world of AI, they don’t necessarily care about forever storage, so the needs are different.
Interviewer
You already mentioned this, Martin. But one thing I find really interesting about your approach is that this is ceramics and glassmaking. These are practices humans have been doing for thousands of years.
Martin Kunze
In my case, it goes even far, far further back, and much further into the future. I was intrigued by the material itself from the geological point of view. Clay is a product of the erosion from rock. It settles on the bottom of lakes to build these layers which are now mined for clay. And this can turn to stone again by temperature and high pressure. So it’s like slate that has been clay, but it’s not clay anymore. It’s stone. This is a process that lasts millions of years, geological periods of time.
The ceramist intervenes into this process and does what nature does in millions of years within hours by firing clay and making clay, which is dissolved in water into stone, which is then solid. A clay mine is also kind of an archive because of the layers you can see, you can reconstruct what happened before in this region. My diploma work was about these layers of clay, which in German has kind of dual meaning with the German word for geology.
It is geology, but it could also be understood as layers of earth. Long ago I would take out lumps of clay directly from the clay mine, cleaning them to see the layers better, and making balls of it. I realized after a year there were some fine lines on the surface of the layers of the sediments. These were traces from crawling worms. When the material lay on the settling on the bottom of lakes, there were worms crawling on the surface and the next layer preserved these traces. That was a touching moment for me to realize I’m not the first being shaping this piece of earth. There were other beings millions of years before, leaving their traces. This resonates very much with my personal thinking, and also in the education of my kids. I always try to get them thinking in longer time frames than we usually use today.