On Sat, 2010-06-26 at 22:35 +0000, jtudor2005 wrote:
> I seem to remember some years ago a company was developing a way to
> preserve data onto paper. I believe they were able to transcribe the
> 1's & 0's to print on archival paper. And a way to accurately scan
> that back into digital.
A freely available method (you can do it at home) is this:
http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
I have not yet tried it myself (no scanner or printer currently attached
to a Windows computer) but this reviewer:
http://www.dansdata.com/gz094.htm
has used it without problems. (The review includes a good overview of
how it works.)
Despite its obvious limitations (only suitable for very short audio
files), one interesting feature of this system is that it is not tied to
any particular hardware or software. The short description of the
encoding method could be included on each page, and would provide a
computer programmer in 100 years time with sufficient information to
write a decoder. Including the source code in printed form along with
the actual data would make the job of writing a decoder even easier.
Richard
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