Personal computers that boot up instantly may be on the market in just a
few years, according to some researchers. Researchers at places such as the
University of Houston, Motorola, Siemens, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and NASA are
working to develop nonvolatile memory, because "you can take it to the
moon, and the same information will be there." Alex Ignatiev of the Texas
Center for Superconductivity says that his group as designed a "simple
resistor" that's much faster to access than RAM and can be applied in a
thin film only a few hundred atomic levels thick.

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