Perhaps its in the details...?
-=RBF=-

        Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 13:48:56 -0500 (EST)
        From: [email protected]
        Subject: Cornell's Supposed Nanotechnology Breakthrough
        To: [email protected]

        April 11, 1995

        Can someone tell me what the breakthrough is? I do not see in the
        press release the news of any new work. The use of STM's to store data
        at very high densities is well known, see, for example, "Technology of
        Proximal Probe Lithography" by Christie Marrian (ed.), SPIE IS10,
        1993.

        Also, since they say they can scan an area 1 x 1 um, but it takes a
micro-
        actuator 100 x 100 um to do this, the utilization of the storage medium
is
        only 1/10,000 -- very, very inefficient. Also, the data rate, as the
press
        release noted is very (very) slow, so it will take thousands of such
probes
        running in parallel to give the data rate of current disk drives.

        -- Steve Morton, Oxford Computer, Inc., Oxford, CT