I find this a very interesting conversation actually. My Grandmother, bless her uncommunicative mouth, recently passed away leaving us with a nice steamer truck full of family memorabilia. Almost all of it was useless because there is no oral history to go along with it. So we have hundreds of wonderful old photos of people we will now never ever know. And these photos from the early part of the 1900’s are fading as well. So in less than a single generation every memory of my family is now gone. Storage techniques are exactly like this. When was the last time you pulled out your old family pictures from the late 50’s early 60’s? Got any Super 8 film movies or VHS tapes of your family and friends or important milestones in your history? While it is important to have records of bank statements and credit records, once you die and your contemporaries join you in the permanent dirt bath, your life history will be gone in a very short period of time. Particularly if you are depending on modern technology to preserve your families history.
It might not be at all practical, but it certainly is interesting, and pretty damn awesome
@term paper writing
Hello spam bot!
Why did you delete my comment about the previous comment being spam, but not delete the actual spam?
“There’s a coding error on the IBM JCL punched card: should be no space between SLINK,and TESTPGM=”
If you weren’t female and this wasn’t inappropriate, I’d tell you to stop talking dirty to us.
The key lies on who does the translation.
It is the translator who makes the translation an efficient tool or not. Whether it is a punch card or an alphabet it does not matter. My point is that the translation may involve a highly abstract concept that only the translator (ie. human being) can convey. Machines are not capable -yet- of this level of abstraction.
As a few have stated, it wouldn’t be very useful for backing up my MP3 collection but half a megabyte of data isn’t without it’s uses. It’s easy for people to forget these days that a single character is still just a single byte and ~500,000 characters can contain a lot of important information. I can think of a few applications for this. I need to hang on to tax records, receipts, bank statements for about 5 years, well before any significant paper or ink decay set in I would think. Obviously I wouldn’t consider these a replacement for digital backups but I do think that if you give me a 500kb file and a piece of paper I’ll be far more likely to locate the piece of paper five years later.
Besides, it’s a single piece of paper. If my tax software had a button “Print paper backup” I’d say, “Why not?”
NASA space probes, rather than assuming 800bpi tape would last forever, summations of data sets would have been nice to have
That there are more efficient encodings than alphabetic is hardly news - the computer screen in front of me has over two million pixels, enough to represent around 300KB of data in even the least efficient encoding. Certainly, you ought to be able to manage a few megabytes on the higher DPI of paper.
But really, why? We already use those efficient encodings to store gigabytes, or even terabytes on magnetic or optical media, either of which takes up vastly less space than it’s paper equivalent. Far easier to achieve redundancy, too - magnetic drives may not last as long as paper, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to clone before they fail…
Now the data storage devices are available with great capacity. like lto 5 tape has the great capacity and high security.