Resistive RAM
It seems that there's now something new under the sun in the world of computer memory. Way back in 1971 Leon Chua noticed that there ought to be a 4th type of basic circuit element, which he called the memristor , alongside the traditional resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Then, just a few years ago in 2008, a group from HP was actually able to create one of these things that Chua had dreamed up. I was expecting that someday, maybe by 2018 or so, people would be starting to make things with memristors that were actually usable. I've recently found that I was way too pessimistic, though, and it seems that people have already made cells of resistive RAM, and that once they can be made cheaply in bulk its going to bring huge changes. If everything works out we'll have memory that is just as fast as RAM but which is non-volatile, that is it can continue to store information even when it looses power. For many years computers have had separate memory and storage