[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[Andrew Weiss]

On Friday, April 12, 2002, at 03:46 PM, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

>
> Kodak sells CD-Rs that they say will last 100 years.  Obviously this 
> has only
> been simulated, not actually tested.
>
> If we really are talking about data for the next century or 3, then we 
> really
> should probably be talking metal, stone, and paper.  Paper would be the 
> most
> convienient, but care needs to be taken to use the right materials.  
> Archiving
> video to paper is easy enough, although you will loose a lot of dynamic 
> range.
> Just print a frame per page.  Including the audio is a bit trickier.  
> Perhaps
> raw PCM in hex, but will people remeber what PCM is?  We could go the 
> old
> film route and use a picture of the wave form I guess.
>
Speaking of which I used to have a nutty idea for storing data using a 
printer... I called it the paper floppy concept... you would have a 
1024x768x256 color image for 8 bit data, and if you could create more 
colors you could increase the amount of data in the same space.  I 
always wanted to see what my data looked like as a color map anyhow.  
You could also vary how fine you could make the dots.  If someone could 
photo etch on metal it would be a really robust format... or perhaps if 
you could etch glass at different prismatic angles to produce a certain 
number of colors per point density via laser you could do some glass 
digital storage disks like CD-ROMS but of much higher capacity.

Andrew