[olePigeon]

http://www.techworld.com/storage/new...fm?newsID=7424
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&sect...=11&y=2006

My dad has a few cannisters he's kept from when he worked at Rolm, it's a couple of programs he'd written at home and transfered to tape (one of them is Wumpus, an old, old game.) He also has a box with some old punch cards.

There's a guy named Sainul Abideen who developed a way to store data by printing it to a sheet of paper (or plastic, or anything you can display the images on) by using a rainbow of colors and geometric shapes.

I remember there was something similar to this a while back, but instead of a colors and shapes, it used just old B&W static filled picture and could hold a few MBs of data.. This one is way more impressive, and can hold 256 GBs of data on a standard sheet of A4.

They're thinking of using it for SIM cards, but this could also be a HUGE step forward with bar codes! Stores could hold a lot more information about a product in a single bar code versus actually maintaining a databse.

Or how about physical, fireproof, backups of rare books and documents on a piece of ceramic or galvanized metal for archival purposes... the size of a postage stamp?

I think this is cool, tons of possible applications.

[olePigeon]

IT Soup: Scam of Indian student developing technology to store 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper

Dang it. Apparently it's a scam. How cool would that've been.

[GSixZero]

It's not a scam, and not really far fetched... 450GB might be overstating it, but you can store tons of data on a single sheet of paper.

I would do some analysis, but this guy did a fairly good job already: IT Soup: Blog Comment

His attempt is fairly rudimentary, and he comes up fairly short of 450GB, but his attempt is almost human readable.

HP's printers can print 72.9 million color combinations, and you can print 134 million + pixels on a standard piece of paper. In theory, that boils down to 9.8 x 10^15 bits, which is 1.1 million gigabytes, or slightly over 1 petabyte. I admit that it's not technologically sane to try to read it, but it's possible in theory.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by GSixZero 

HP's printers can print 72.9 million color combinations, and you can print 134 million + pixels on a standard piece of paper. In theory, that boils down to 9.8 x 10^15 bits, which is 1.1 million gigabytes, or slightly over 1 petabyte. I admit that it's not technologically sane to try to read it, but it's possible in theory.

Yes... but no.

The printers can print 73 million tones, but not in one pixel. A given pixel can be only one of a few colors, because the ink droplets can be only a few sizes, and only a few colors of ink are available. Only colored surfaces can be one of millions of colors, because adjacent pixels blend in the eye to form a continuous tone.

Realistically, you'd be able to get maybe 100 pixels per inch of identifiably continuous-tone pixels. That means (allowing a 1/2 inch margin around the page) 750,000 addressable pixels. Even if each pixel could be positively identified as 1 of 256 colors (that's the same as 1 byte), that's still only 750KB per page.

tooki

[GSixZero]

Ok, I'll concede that there's no way to print that many colors into a single pixel.

How did you come up with 750K pixels? Assuming 1200 linear dpi, you'd be able to get a lot more pixels than 750K. 8 * 10.5 * 1200 * 1200 = 120 million pixels.

[tooki]

As I said, I assumed 100 pixels per inch, because that's a realistic number for color printing with continuous tones. (I think that 256 colors is a reasonable one, to allow for ink tolerance, printing variation, and scanning variation.) That's 100ppi. On a letter size page (8.5x11") with a 1/2 inch margin all the way around, that leaves a usable area of 7.5x10". 7.5x100 = 750. 10x100 = 1000. 750x1000 = 750,000.

tooki

[GSixZero]

Ah, OK, understood.

[turtle777]

Ok, the 450 GB disqualified it right from the beginning. How could anyone think that was possible on a piece of paper ? That would be a higher data density than on BlueRay / HD DVD.

-t