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How to Store Data on Paper?

monperrus.net

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Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#71

Post by nulbyte »

sweettea wrote: post #17
usrbinbash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In our post apocalyptic future scholars will be using their quills to translate archives of these Imagine tomes of programming lore, dutifully transcribed by rooms of silent scribes, acolytes carrying freshly finished pages to and fro, each page beautifully illuminated wih pictures of the binary saints, to ward off Beelzebug.

See also: the first part of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Thank you for this. I had never heard of this book, but it sounds intriguing, and my local bookstore happens to have a copy.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#73

Post by pavel_lishin »

pastage wrote: post #23

Bits per [cm²|cm³|kg] is interesting like you get with cuneiform ceramic tablets[1], this one get about 1 word per cm² and cuneiform is crazy dense, I have no real grasp of how sumerian or akkadian words worked. I think it was heavily context based because from some lecture[2] at the British Museum. I have seen people do ceramics where information was stacked in layers and had to be destroyed to extract. The ultimate…

I don't recall the Fithp's artefacts requiring destruction to read; I thought they were just created with (presumably) lasers, writing the information in a way that would resist erosion - if one does get eroded, you just slice the eroded part away, re-revealing it again.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#75

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

IAmBroom wrote: post #60
lifthrasiir wrote: post #25

I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful ( For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this…

> It is hard to preserve paper, unless you are willing to sacrifice its information density even more. We have paper books from 500 years ago. Microfiche is already deteriorating. If you keep paper dry and flat, and use pH-neutral inks and paper, it is extremely stable.

Dry and flat... Laminated? Or will the plastic degrade quicker than the paper?

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#76

Post by mk_stjames »

70-100 kilobytes on a single sheet of paper by tiling QR codes is pretty dense.

I find it interesting that, if you were print 4 sheets double sided you would have roughly the same amount of information stored as a 720kb 5 1/4" floppy disk and if you cut and folded it would take up roughly the same size and weight.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#77

Post by dsign »

pastage wrote: post #23

Bits per [cm²|cm³|kg] is interesting like you get with cuneiform ceramic tablets[1], this one get about 1 word per cm² and cuneiform is crazy dense, I have no real grasp of how sumerian or akkadian words worked. I think it was heavily context based because from some lecture[2] at the British Museum. I have seen people do ceramics where information was stacked in layers and had to be destroyed to extract. The ultimate…

Akkadian is/was syllabic. The language is pretty well preserved I believe, some say there is more text in Akkadian than in classical Latin[^1].

[^1]: Can't find the source right now, so take this with a grain of salt.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#78

Post by dsign »

How long before anybody uses this to create those pieces of paper that glue the covers in a hardcover to the paper block? Just saying, with the advent of LLMs, handcrafted paper books may become all the rage again.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#79

Post by ctrlc-root »

b112 wrote: post #33
lifthrasiir wrote: post #25

I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful ( For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this…

I wonder, as others have said, an easily OCRable font. However, maybe an added compressor, zip type program specially designed for the limited character set. If we just have text files, and mayve vector graphics for simple schematics, that's a lot of info.

Those fonts do exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#80

Post by mystified5016 »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #75
IAmBroom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is hard to preserve paper, unless you are willing to sacrifice its information density even more. We have paper books from 500 years ago. Microfiche is already deteriorating. If you keep paper dry and flat, and use pH-neutral inks and paper, it is extremely stable.

Dry and flat... Laminated? Or will the plastic degrade quicker than the paper?

Likely the adhesive in the laminate would degrade the paper over long periods. Lamination also causes additional physical stress on the contained page when handled.

I'd also expect the plastics to go yellow and opaque over long periods, and recovering the document without damage may be difficult or impossible

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