Computer Memory Based on the Protein Bacteriorhodopsin While magnetic and semi-conductor based information storage devices have been in use since the middle 1950's, today's computers and volumes of information require increasingly more efficient and faster methods of storing data. While the speed of integrated circuit random access memory (RAM) has increased steadily over the past ten to fifteen years, the limits of these systems are rapidly approaching. In response to the rapidly changing face of computing and demand for  ·             physically smaller,  ·             greater capacity,  ·             bandwidth,  A number of alternative methods to integrated circuit information storage have surfaced recently.  Among the most promising of the new alternatives are  photopolymer-based devices,  holographic optical memory storage devices, and  protein-based optical memory storage using rhodopsin ,  photosynthetic reaction centers, cytochrome c, photosystems I and II, phycobiliproteins, and phytochrome.  This article focuses mainly on protein-based optical memory storage using the photosensitive protein bacteriorhodopsin with the two-photon method of exciting the molecules, but briefly describes what is involved in the other two. Bacteriorhodopsin is a light-harvesting protein from bacteria that live in salt marshes that has shown some promise as a feasible optical data storage. The current work is to hybridize this biological molecule with the solid state components of a typical computer.