//Hijack//
I wonder how long the phonograph record on the Voyager will last? I would think not for very long, compared to the distance it might travel.
Where is it stowed on the probe? If it was uncovered, surely it would be at risk from micrometeorites and the like?
Actually, he *has *to be full of crap; consider:
He claims that he can store 256GB of data on one sheet of A4 using conventional printers, retrievable by conventional scanners.
I can accurately represent his printed page (at, say, 1200dpi, 24-bit colour - probably absurdly generous parameters, but lets run with them) as an uncompressed .tga, using only 400MB of disk space - I just magically compressed his 256GB of data into a file one six-hundredth of the size. Perhaps Now I can feed my .tga image back to his rainbow technology and print it out on a postage stamp, which I can scan again and produce an even smaller file, etc…
I don’t think it’s fair to refer to paper or microfiche as “analog media.” It’s no more “analog” than magnetic tape or disk. After all, magnetic tape is also used for analog audio. “Digital” is how you use the medium, not an inherent characteristics.
(Though admittedly, there are some media that are inherently digital, like flash memory.)
OK, I’ll concede that as a matter of semantics. The expected use of those media in the context of this discussion is analog, however, barring a philosophical discussion concerning whether their resolution imposes “digitization”.
Indeed, punch cards and paper tape are paper and digital. One could encode binary information on microfilm if so minded. Perhaps there’s even a system for doing it, though I’m not familiar with one. Googling “digital microfilm” will turn up a lot of systems for scanning microfilm images or archiving digital data onto microfilm.
BTW, I believe that another reason a lot of corporations still maintain a paper document archive is legal admissability. The court system still puts a lot of weight on a paper original, and is suspicious of documentation that it is archived only in electronic form. Microfilm has been established as having a certain amount of legal validity as well. This is one reason why companies nervous about SOX compliance are creating microfilm archives in some cases.