 This thermo-mechanical data storage concept formed the basis of the Millipede project which was initialized by Peter Vettiger and Gerd Binnig at the IBM Research laboratories Zurich in 1995.It was an example of a memory storage device with a large array of parallel probes, which was however never commercialized due to growing competition from non-volatile memory such as flash memory.The storage medium of the Millipede memory consisted of polymers with shape memory functionality, like e.g.