Compact Disks will be a thing of the past – one day. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico say they have stored the equivalent of 180 CD-ROMs on a 1 long pin of stainless steel. Using an ion beam to inscribe the pits, they produced dots only 500 atoms across to represent the data. But it will be years before the first ion beam drives appear in the shops, and even when they do, it is doubtful if anyone will be able to find enough data to fill one.