11 ms·

Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium

164 points by adrian_mrd 8y ago

Something1234 8y ago
Anybody know why it says that no connection is available, yet a page still loads. It seems like a new way of defeating ad block. Edit: Even after disabling ad block, still says that there is no connection. Even worse, just after I actually buy a copy of their magazine.
- adrian_mrd 8y ago
  Hi, I’m using Purify ‘content blocker’ on iOS (11.4, Safari) and I can view the article without any issues.
hjnilsson 8y ago
Well there is sowmthing to be said for simpler formats, that can be read by basic engineering skills, compared to for example storing something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of. For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily.
- derefr 8y ago
  I don’t disagree with your general point, but for this specific assertion: > something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of Does it really require millions of lines? Even if you’re just targeting that one model of drive, rather than writing a general purpose SATA/USB kernel stack? If what’s on there is, say, JPEG images, libjpeg (plus its dependencies in glibc, I guess) isn’t “millions of lines” either. Where are these millions of lines? (I’m speaking as someone who has written a unikernel with disk IO and graphics support. It was far less than a million lines!)
  - ics 8y ago
    I think they're considering the entire start-to-finish process of viewing, i.e. mounting the drive, decoding the jpeg, displaying on screen.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Compare the BBC Domesday Project to the original Domesday Book from 1085. One can be read today, the other not so much. You ask what the folks at BBC were thinking, did they never consult an archival librarian?
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      I played with that when it first came out. We had the discs and the player, it was very impressive but even then I knew that there was no way that it would last for even a decade. It was a puny bit of data for todays standards (about 500M in total), but of the day it was incredible. Back then a mainframe winchester pack with the same capacity would be roughly the size of a washer-dryer combination. The data not being publicly accessible at the moment is more of a copyright rather than a technical issue.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily. You can be sure the JPEG and BMP and PNG format will be, and plain text and basic html as well. So you don't need to print anything, just to have plenty of backup and repeat the backup process every few years (which takes all of 2-3 minutes even for 1000s of images).
  - adrian_mrd 8y ago
    Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). There is something to be said for tangible, archival-paper printed photographs. Maybe printing the top 100 photos each year is a good middle ground, but to each their own :)
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). That's why I advocated for multiple copies -- and in a redundant format with corrections codes even better. It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides...
      - makmanalp 8y ago
        > It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides... Not that I disagree with you, but this is an interesting point. I've heard archivists argue that with simpler analog storage, the curve for corrupt bits vs interpretability is smoothish, but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore"
        evincarofautumn 8y ago
        > with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore" Digital anything, really. Analog signals degrade somewhat gracefully—you have to explicitly build error correction into a digital signal. A relatively recent example of a bungled transition from analog to digital: when the US switched to digital television in 2009, my family suddenly and completely lost many local/lower-powered/more distant stations that we used to be able to get with just a little static or distortion. And the channels we continued to get wou— —ut out occasio— —in a really a—oying wa— and became unwatchable (well, unlistenable).
freedomben 8y ago
As a kid I got to play with microfilm and microfiche at the library while my mom did research. I don't have a lot of pleasant memories from childhood, but this was an exception. My mind was intrigued and blown by this. Thinking back on the experience, it was incredible. I could go grab a copy of a newspaper from any particular day in any year. I remember reading the actual newspapers from the early 20th century. Big historical events that are in history books, really take on a different meaning to you when you read them as they were reported in near-real-time. The ability of microfilm to snapshot history in a way different than say viewing a jpg or png, is fascinating. If you are ever bored, and can find a library that will give you access, you should definitely check it out. It's an experience I think all hackers should have. Such simple yet powerful machines, built on a highly non-technical system of convention. Very cool. Sorry for the long walk down nostalgia lane.
- egeozcan 8y ago
  Anyone knows if I can find such an archive near Hesse, Germany?
  - dmitrij 8y ago
    You will find good holdings of national and international periodicals in university and higher ed libraries, in Frankfurt/Main, Marburg, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Gießen, Kassel and so on. Also, the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) is in Frankfurt/Main.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Hessisches Landesarchiv, Stadtarchive
- jacquesm 8y ago
  It shouldn't be too hard to adapt the kind of tech behind web based map applications (tiling and zoom) to newspaper archives.
  - ryanhuff 8y ago
adrian_mrd 8y ago
“Microfilm machines trained people’s eyes to read differently: A blur of rapidly advancing images replaced flipping through pages, a precursor to the transition from reading books to surfing the web. Once we adjusted to the nonlinear reading devices, we wanted to jump around instead of advance through page after page.“ I oft find it interesting how a medium (and/or technology) can fundamentally alter the basic experience of reading.
- evgen 8y ago
  It was definitely a different way to interact with the medium. Back in the early 80s I helped my mother do some genealogy research and spent many weekends in various libraries going through obituary sections of a lot of major metro papers from 1920-1940. You quickly learned to recognize the 'shape' of the sort of page you were looking for and then would hit the advance button on the machine to spin forward until you hit something that looked like the right section. It was the sort of pattern recognition you probably do today when scrubbing through a video looking for a particular type of scene, but with pages of text. Every paper had its own style of page layout so it took an hour or two to learn what you were looking for when you switched to a different paper, but the process became fairly automatic with a bit of practice.
  - VLM 8y ago
    Human binary search algo for page numbers, you meld with the machine and after a couple dozen hours its creepy how I could advance exactly 143 pages if I so desired by turning the dial just so; not any more surprising than video game accomplishments after a couple dozen hours. I'm a gen-x so I'm so old my youth predated even cdroms; in fact I got an off brand early cdrom reader in high school as a very expensive birthday gift. So in early high school I spent a couple weeks reading microfilm of Scientific American magazine searching out all the "amateur scientist" columns from the 50s and 60s, some real gold there. I printed out some interesting columns. Still have some of those printouts. The technology to "photocopy from microfilm" is pretty obvious optically, the image is projected onto what amounts to a xerox photocopier. Of course kids these days may not believe fully analogy photocopiers ever existed, but certainly they did, until relatively recently as digital multifunction devices took over. Around the turn of the century all the Amateur Scientist columns were combined into a multimedia cdrom using turn of the century ancient java to navigate tens of thousands of one-page-per-pdf files. I no longer have infrastructure that can run that old of a java version although hand navigation of an image of the cdrom filesystem is possible (the file names aren't too insane) and I no longer own a desktop or laptop with optical drive to read the legacy disk, although I can, for now, scare up a USB cdrom reader if needed. I lived near a depository library; did you? If you can get access to a federal depository library then you'll have access to microfilm version of complete ancient census records; I spent a long time looking at those and printing out 1800s era census records. My future wife bought "family tree maker" cdrom custom format disks of census data (this is all pre-internet pre-ancestry.com era by at least a decade). Obviously those custom cdroms of census records are useless today unless you have a complete early 90s PC emulator, and searching online works better and there's been several decades of census data released since then, LOL. I find it fascinating that I grew up before cdroms, then in my youth cdroms would replace "everything", and now cdroms are a dead media. I'm and not really all that decrepit and old outside of SV hiring standards and ageism, I scarcely have a gray hair, maybe one or two, don't even have any grand kids yet. CDroms may have been born and died in my young adult years, but there's still microfilm out there.
nayuki 8y ago
I appreciate how the article highlights the longevity of polyester-based microfilm and the simple technology (lamp and magnifier) needed to read it. But as a digital native myself, I'm disappointed that they failed to emphasize the biggest advantage of digital information storage - the fact that data can be copied perfectly, as many times as you want. Analog microfilm cannot be copied perfectly - the original is always better than the copy. This means the microfilm is a unique artifact that needs to be preserved and taken care of. One disaster, one fire, or one careless handler, and the object is damaged. With digital technology, we pay a high price in the lines of code to build an application and interface, to specify seemingly opaque binary file formats, to have physical media (floppy, CD, etc.) go obsolete in a decade, and to build complex CPUs - but never forget that what we gain is the tremendous ability to copy perfectly. This is what allows us to share a file with someone and know that their copy is a perfect backup for mine in case mine is lost. This is what allows us to transfer files from old, slow, unreliable media (e.g. floppy disks) to new, fast media (e.g. SSDs) without missing a beat. This is why we can take a sizable collection of a thousand audio CDs and cram them into one convenient hard disk drive (as WAV, not MP3), with the exact same audio quality. This is why we can transmit files over the Internet - we surely can't transmit analog data over a distance without a high risk of degradation. If we collectively accept that storing information digitally with the ability to make perfect copies is worth the effort, then there are things we can do to improve the status quo. We need to make it easier to find and manage file duplicates - otherwise it's hard to know whether a copied file has been modified or not. We need emphasize building applications on open standards. We need to make file format specifications accessible, well-defined, and easier to understand. We need to make systems that have low implementation complexity (e.g. CPU with few transistors, OS with few lines of code) to show what is the minimum knowledge needed to reboot the technology. While microfilm may last 500 years, digital data could truly be forever - as long as you copy it periodically.
- makmanalp 8y ago
  > the fact that data can be copied perfectly, as many times as you want Tangentially, this makes me wonder: While microfilm can't be copied perfectly, isn't it true that the source quality (e.g. the crispness of the print) is vastly lower than the resolution of the medium itself? Which seems like it would imply that the "lossy" transformation might in some sense still lossless, at least for a while - like converting a high bitrate mp3 recording of a radio broadcast into a lower bitrate one. Or perhaps the kinds of loss are different. I'm sure I'm confusing a lot of ideas and butchering some terms here.
eesmith 8y ago
A few tidbits I know about the topic. One of the organizations which helped push microfilm was the Documentation Institute, founded by Watson Davis in 1935, which became the American Documentation Institute in 1937. (As an aside, "documentation" was the hot term in library science in the 1930s. "Documentation" meaning "collection of informational papers" is only from 1927, says https://www.etymonline.com/word/documentation https://www.etymonline.com/word/documentation . As a further aside for those involved in science fairs, Watson Davis also founded "the Science Clubs of America, reaching at one point roughly a million school-age children across the United States; he also was one of the originators of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search". He participated in the World Congress of Universal Documentation. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Universal_Documentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Universal_Do... > The World Congress of Universal Documentation was held from 16 to 21 August 1937 in Paris, France. Delegates from 45 countries met to discuss means by which all of the world's information, in print, in manuscript, and in other forms, could be efficiently organized and made accessible. ... > The main resolution adopted by the congress proposed that microfilm be used to make information universally available.[8] Watson Davis, chairman of the American delegation and president of the ADI, stated that the volume of information being produced created difficult problems of access and preservation, but that these could be solved by the use of microfilm. ... > In his address to the Congress, H. G. Wells said that he thought that his idea of the "world brain" was a precursor to the ideas other delegates were proposing, and explicitly linked the projects being discussed to the work of the encyclopédistes: These are all ideas which percolated through Vannevar Bush's Memex and many others to become the modern internet. Also, one of the co-founders of the ADI was Atherton Seidell. He published a series of articles in Science promoting the use of microfilm. Eg, from 24 August 1934 - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/80/2069/184 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/80/2069/184 .
DoctorOetker 8y ago
I've often hesitated about getting a microfilm or microfiche reader, but what would really get me over the edge is some kind of similar equipment to make microfilm or microfiche to use with the reader. Did such "consumer" equipment ever exist, or did all the libraries and institutions buy premade microfiche or microfilm, with the exception of a few dedicated conversion companies? Are there any combined devices/stations that can be used to both read AND create either microfilm or microfiche?
- stan_rogers 8y ago
  Everything one needed was available; it just wasn't practical in the "consumer goods" sense. You needed an apochromatic flat-field lens, generally optimized specifically for the magnification levels involved (since sufficient optimization over a very wide range of focal distances is an extremely difficult thing). The film has to be extremely low sensitivity to have good enough acutance (think ISO 6-12 as "high speed", since the emulsion needs to be extremely thin). You need consistent lighting so you can have a decent idea of what your exposure will be like, and before Polaroid polarization film cropped up, keeping glare under control was a bit of a bugger. You needed a rock-solid setup, since your exposure was going to take a while. The film needed to be kept very flat - there's far less room for any deviation than there would be for taking general photographs of the big world. In a world of silicon wafers, it's hard to remember that keeping pieces of floppy (and often tightly-rolled) plastic flat enough was once one of the hard parts. Processing was pretty critical - a little too long in the soup, and the black bleeds (that's how halftones are created using a line screen). So, you could get it all going with a decent copy stand and lights, the right (expensive) camera and lens and a goodly amount of faff... or you could get a service that had a dedicated process camera that paid for itself through constant usage and craftspeople who do that sort of thing for a living do it for you for a smallish fee. If you had regular archiving needs, the cost of the set-up wasn't horrible - it was certainly cheaper than a process camera for printing plates. It just wasn't a home-and-small-office thing by any normal standards. Most of it, though, you could do now with an "eBay special" camera and lens and a bit of ortho-litho film. It's still available as sheet film. That would mean red reads as black and non-repro blue is a thing. Panchromatic repro work would be a lot harder since Kodak killed off Technical Pan. Tech Pan was kind of super-fast film, though - you'd use it at "ISO" 20-50, depending on the application - so while it was spectacular for general photography, it was just at the edge of what would be useful for microfiche.
consumer451 8y ago
Are there any earlier examples of data compression that microfilm?
- paulmd 8y ago
  The earliest example of that general technology would probably be the Leica camera, as this was the first time a negative had been designed for enlargement rather than contact printing (or at least, for high degrees of enlargement). This is only really physically reducing the size of the storage device though, not really compression. https://gmpphoto.blogspot.com/2018/04/ur-leica-most-influential-photographic.html https://gmpphoto.blogspot.com/2018/04/ur-leica-most-influent... In terms of compression as a whole, the first example would probably be military/commercial codebooks. A relatively modern example would be the q-code, where a predetermined sequence of words are encoded as a 3-letter sequence ("QRA" becomes "What is the name of your vessel/station") but I'm sure there are prior examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code
  - paulmd 8y ago
    (or, as the kids would say, 'new telegraph who dis?') Here's a link I found on some early codebooks: http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/codebook/index.htm http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/codebook/index.htm
fanf2 8y ago
A super interesting 1960s intersection between microfiche and digital technology: the IBM 1360 photostore: http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/index.html http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 This was a machine capable of storing a terabit of data on write-once photographic film. It wrote to the film using a scanning electron beam, and then developed the film using a fully automated film processing lab, and finally stored the film cartridges in a robotic storage library. Amazingly cool, but required a lot of expert maintenance and diligent cleaning.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  And the early versions of the PLATO educational computing system used a computer-controlled microfiche reader to display graphics beyond what was possible at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    It's as though we got so busy using all of this stuff to do ordinary things that we kept making the same thing (GUI, net) better and better, but forgot to keep trying new , richer ideas. As Plato attempted to do. That came out of the U. of Illinois. Where'd the visionary academics go?
    - canhascodez 8y ago
      I believe that the idea that the end of some avenue of human ingenuity has been reached, and your implicit statement of differing values between the past and present, are both perennially recurrent throughout history. It's not necessarily a bad thing if today's academics are pursuing things that are not among your interests, and it's more likely than not that the speed of the dissemination of ideas, the recognition of their value, and their broad application has not appreciably changed in recent decades (assuming that it's more meaningful to talk about that in terms of a "March of Progress" than a "Random Walk of Progress"). I would think it most reasonable to assume that the academics are where they have always been, doing the same arcane and incomprehensible things that academics have always done, and that any appearance to the contrary was a fault of my own perspective.
Animats 8y ago
Newer microfilm may last 500 years, but the older stuff, especially Kalvar film, has serious life problems. Kalvar film gives off volatiles which corrode everything around it except Kalvar film.
ggm 8y ago
Vax/VMS source, on microfiche. Hunt the bugs in Bliss32. Happy days.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
Stone tablets last 2 millenniums... A better idea is to make multiple copies and store them far away in case the warehouse burns down.

164 points by adrian_mrd 8y ago

Anybody know why it says that no connection is available, yet a page still loads. It seems like a new way of defeating ad block. Edit: Even after disabling ad block, still says that there is no connection. Even worse, just after I actually buy a copy of their magazine.

adrian_mrd 8y ago
Hi, I’m using Purify ‘content blocker’ on iOS (11.4, Safari) and I can view the article without any issues.

hjnilsson 8y ago

Well there is sowmthing to be said for simpler formats, that can be read by basic engineering skills, compared to for example storing something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of. For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily.

derefr 8y ago
I don’t disagree with your general point, but for this specific assertion: > something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of Does it really require millions of lines? Even if you’re just targeting that one model of drive, rather than writing a general purpose SATA/USB kernel stack? If what’s on there is, say, JPEG images, libjpeg (plus its dependencies in glibc, I guess) isn’t “millions of lines” either. Where are these millions of lines? (I’m speaking as someone who has written a unikernel with disk IO and graphics support. It was far less than a million lines!)
- ics 8y ago
  I think they're considering the entire start-to-finish process of viewing, i.e. mounting the drive, decoding the jpeg, displaying on screen.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Compare the BBC Domesday Project to the original Domesday Book from 1085. One can be read today, the other not so much. You ask what the folks at BBC were thinking, did they never consult an archival librarian?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I played with that when it first came out. We had the discs and the player, it was very impressive but even then I knew that there was no way that it would last for even a decade. It was a puny bit of data for todays standards (about 500M in total), but of the day it was incredible. Back then a mainframe winchester pack with the same capacity would be roughly the size of a washer-dryer combination. The data not being publicly accessible at the moment is more of a copyright rather than a technical issue.
coldtea 8y ago
>For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily. You can be sure the JPEG and BMP and PNG format will be, and plain text and basic html as well. So you don't need to print anything, just to have plenty of backup and repeat the backup process every few years (which takes all of 2-3 minutes even for 1000s of images).
- adrian_mrd 8y ago
  Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). There is something to be said for tangible, archival-paper printed photographs. Maybe printing the top 100 photos each year is a good middle ground, but to each their own :)
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). That's why I advocated for multiple copies -- and in a redundant format with corrections codes even better. It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides...
    - makmanalp 8y ago
      > It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides... Not that I disagree with you, but this is an interesting point. I've heard archivists argue that with simpler analog storage, the curve for corrupt bits vs interpretability is smoothish, but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore"
      - evincarofautumn 8y ago
        > with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore" Digital anything, really. Analog signals degrade somewhat gracefully—you have to explicitly build error correction into a digital signal. A relatively recent example of a bungled transition from analog to digital: when the US switched to digital television in 2009, my family suddenly and completely lost many local/lower-powered/more distant stations that we used to be able to get with just a little static or distortion. And the channels we continued to get wou— —ut out occasio— —in a really a—oying wa— and became unwatchable (well, unlistenable).

freedomben 8y ago

As a kid I got to play with microfilm and microfiche at the library while my mom did research. I don't have a lot of pleasant memories from childhood, but this was an exception. My mind was intrigued and blown by this. Thinking back on the experience, it was incredible. I could go grab a copy of a newspaper from any particular day in any year. I remember reading the actual newspapers from the early 20th century. Big historical events that are in history books, really take on a different meaning to you when you read them as they were reported in near-real-time. The ability of microfilm to snapshot history in a way different than say viewing a jpg or png, is fascinating. If you are ever bored, and can find a library that will give you access, you should definitely check it out. It's an experience I think all hackers should have. Such simple yet powerful machines, built on a highly non-technical system of convention. Very cool. Sorry for the long walk down nostalgia lane.

egeozcan 8y ago
Anyone knows if I can find such an archive near Hesse, Germany?
- dmitrij 8y ago
  You will find good holdings of national and international periodicals in university and higher ed libraries, in Frankfurt/Main, Marburg, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Gießen, Kassel and so on. Also, the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) is in Frankfurt/Main.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Hessisches Landesarchiv, Stadtarchive
jacquesm 8y ago
It shouldn't be too hard to adapt the kind of tech behind web based map applications (tiling and zoom) to newspaper archives.
- ryanhuff 8y ago

adrian_mrd 8y ago

“Microfilm machines trained people’s eyes to read differently: A blur of rapidly advancing images replaced flipping through pages, a precursor to the transition from reading books to surfing the web. Once we adjusted to the nonlinear reading devices, we wanted to jump around instead of advance through page after page.“ I oft find it interesting how a medium (and/or technology) can fundamentally alter the basic experience of reading.

evgen 8y ago
It was definitely a different way to interact with the medium. Back in the early 80s I helped my mother do some genealogy research and spent many weekends in various libraries going through obituary sections of a lot of major metro papers from 1920-1940. You quickly learned to recognize the 'shape' of the sort of page you were looking for and then would hit the advance button on the machine to spin forward until you hit something that looked like the right section. It was the sort of pattern recognition you probably do today when scrubbing through a video looking for a particular type of scene, but with pages of text. Every paper had its own style of page layout so it took an hour or two to learn what you were looking for when you switched to a different paper, but the process became fairly automatic with a bit of practice.
- VLM 8y ago
  Human binary search algo for page numbers, you meld with the machine and after a couple dozen hours its creepy how I could advance exactly 143 pages if I so desired by turning the dial just so; not any more surprising than video game accomplishments after a couple dozen hours. I'm a gen-x so I'm so old my youth predated even cdroms; in fact I got an off brand early cdrom reader in high school as a very expensive birthday gift. So in early high school I spent a couple weeks reading microfilm of Scientific American magazine searching out all the "amateur scientist" columns from the 50s and 60s, some real gold there. I printed out some interesting columns. Still have some of those printouts. The technology to "photocopy from microfilm" is pretty obvious optically, the image is projected onto what amounts to a xerox photocopier. Of course kids these days may not believe fully analogy photocopiers ever existed, but certainly they did, until relatively recently as digital multifunction devices took over. Around the turn of the century all the Amateur Scientist columns were combined into a multimedia cdrom using turn of the century ancient java to navigate tens of thousands of one-page-per-pdf files. I no longer have infrastructure that can run that old of a java version although hand navigation of an image of the cdrom filesystem is possible (the file names aren't too insane) and I no longer own a desktop or laptop with optical drive to read the legacy disk, although I can, for now, scare up a USB cdrom reader if needed. I lived near a depository library; did you? If you can get access to a federal depository library then you'll have access to microfilm version of complete ancient census records; I spent a long time looking at those and printing out 1800s era census records. My future wife bought "family tree maker" cdrom custom format disks of census data (this is all pre-internet pre-ancestry.com era by at least a decade). Obviously those custom cdroms of census records are useless today unless you have a complete early 90s PC emulator, and searching online works better and there's been several decades of census data released since then, LOL. I find it fascinating that I grew up before cdroms, then in my youth cdroms would replace "everything", and now cdroms are a dead media. I'm and not really all that decrepit and old outside of SV hiring standards and ageism, I scarcely have a gray hair, maybe one or two, don't even have any grand kids yet. CDroms may have been born and died in my young adult years, but there's still microfilm out there.

nayuki 8y ago

I appreciate how the article highlights the longevity of polyester-based microfilm and the simple technology (lamp and magnifier) needed to read it. But as a digital native myself, I'm disappointed that they failed to emphasize the biggest advantage of digital information storage - the fact that data can be copied perfectly, as many times as you want. Analog microfilm cannot be copied perfectly - the original is always better than the copy. This means the microfilm is a unique artifact that needs to be preserved and taken care of. One disaster, one fire, or one careless handler, and the object is damaged. With digital technology, we pay a high price in the lines of code to build an application and interface, to specify seemingly opaque binary file formats, to have physical media (floppy, CD, etc.) go obsolete in a decade, and to build complex CPUs - but never forget that what we gain is the tremendous ability to copy perfectly. This is what allows us to share a file with someone and know that their copy is a perfect backup for mine in case mine is lost. This is what allows us to transfer files from old, slow, unreliable media (e.g. floppy disks) to new, fast media (e.g. SSDs) without missing a beat. This is why we can take a sizable collection of a thousand audio CDs and cram them into one convenient hard disk drive (as WAV, not MP3), with the exact same audio quality. This is why we can transmit files over the Internet - we surely can't transmit analog data over a distance without a high risk of degradation. If we collectively accept that storing information digitally with the ability to make perfect copies is worth the effort, then there are things we can do to improve the status quo. We need to make it easier to find and manage file duplicates - otherwise it's hard to know whether a copied file has been modified or not. We need emphasize building applications on open standards. We need to make file format specifications accessible, well-defined, and easier to understand. We need to make systems that have low implementation complexity (e.g. CPU with few transistors, OS with few lines of code) to show what is the minimum knowledge needed to reboot the technology. While microfilm may last 500 years, digital data could truly be forever - as long as you copy it periodically.

makmanalp 8y ago
> the fact that data can be copied perfectly, as many times as you want Tangentially, this makes me wonder: While microfilm can't be copied perfectly, isn't it true that the source quality (e.g. the crispness of the print) is vastly lower than the resolution of the medium itself? Which seems like it would imply that the "lossy" transformation might in some sense still lossless, at least for a while - like converting a high bitrate mp3 recording of a radio broadcast into a lower bitrate one. Or perhaps the kinds of loss are different. I'm sure I'm confusing a lot of ideas and butchering some terms here.

eesmith 8y ago

A few tidbits I know about the topic. One of the organizations which helped push microfilm was the Documentation Institute, founded by Watson Davis in 1935, which became the American Documentation Institute in 1937. (As an aside, "documentation" was the hot term in library science in the 1930s. "Documentation" meaning "collection of informational papers" is only from 1927, says https://www.etymonline.com/word/documentation https://www.etymonline.com/word/documentation . As a further aside for those involved in science fairs, Watson Davis also founded "the Science Clubs of America, reaching at one point roughly a million school-age children across the United States; he also was one of the originators of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search". He participated in the World Congress of Universal Documentation. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Universal_Documentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Universal_Do... > The World Congress of Universal Documentation was held from 16 to 21 August 1937 in Paris, France. Delegates from 45 countries met to discuss means by which all of the world's information, in print, in manuscript, and in other forms, could be efficiently organized and made accessible. ... > The main resolution adopted by the congress proposed that microfilm be used to make information universally available.[8] Watson Davis, chairman of the American delegation and president of the ADI, stated that the volume of information being produced created difficult problems of access and preservation, but that these could be solved by the use of microfilm. ... > In his address to the Congress, H. G. Wells said that he thought that his idea of the "world brain" was a precursor to the ideas other delegates were proposing, and explicitly linked the projects being discussed to the work of the encyclopédistes: These are all ideas which percolated through Vannevar Bush's Memex and many others to become the modern internet. Also, one of the co-founders of the ADI was Atherton Seidell. He published a series of articles in Science promoting the use of microfilm. Eg, from 24 August 1934 - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/80/2069/184 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/80/2069/184 .

DoctorOetker 8y ago

I've often hesitated about getting a microfilm or microfiche reader, but what would really get me over the edge is some kind of similar equipment to make microfilm or microfiche to use with the reader. Did such "consumer" equipment ever exist, or did all the libraries and institutions buy premade microfiche or microfilm, with the exception of a few dedicated conversion companies? Are there any combined devices/stations that can be used to both read AND create either microfilm or microfiche?

stan_rogers 8y ago
Everything one needed was available; it just wasn't practical in the "consumer goods" sense. You needed an apochromatic flat-field lens, generally optimized specifically for the magnification levels involved (since sufficient optimization over a very wide range of focal distances is an extremely difficult thing). The film has to be extremely low sensitivity to have good enough acutance (think ISO 6-12 as "high speed", since the emulsion needs to be extremely thin). You need consistent lighting so you can have a decent idea of what your exposure will be like, and before Polaroid polarization film cropped up, keeping glare under control was a bit of a bugger. You needed a rock-solid setup, since your exposure was going to take a while. The film needed to be kept very flat - there's far less room for any deviation than there would be for taking general photographs of the big world. In a world of silicon wafers, it's hard to remember that keeping pieces of floppy (and often tightly-rolled) plastic flat enough was once one of the hard parts. Processing was pretty critical - a little too long in the soup, and the black bleeds (that's how halftones are created using a line screen). So, you could get it all going with a decent copy stand and lights, the right (expensive) camera and lens and a goodly amount of faff... or you could get a service that had a dedicated process camera that paid for itself through constant usage and craftspeople who do that sort of thing for a living do it for you for a smallish fee. If you had regular archiving needs, the cost of the set-up wasn't horrible - it was certainly cheaper than a process camera for printing plates. It just wasn't a home-and-small-office thing by any normal standards. Most of it, though, you could do now with an "eBay special" camera and lens and a bit of ortho-litho film. It's still available as sheet film. That would mean red reads as black and non-repro blue is a thing. Panchromatic repro work would be a lot harder since Kodak killed off Technical Pan. Tech Pan was kind of super-fast film, though - you'd use it at "ISO" 20-50, depending on the application - so while it was spectacular for general photography, it was just at the edge of what would be useful for microfiche.

consumer451 8y ago

Are there any earlier examples of data compression that microfilm?

paulmd 8y ago
The earliest example of that general technology would probably be the Leica camera, as this was the first time a negative had been designed for enlargement rather than contact printing (or at least, for high degrees of enlargement). This is only really physically reducing the size of the storage device though, not really compression. https://gmpphoto.blogspot.com/2018/04/ur-leica-most-influential-photographic.html https://gmpphoto.blogspot.com/2018/04/ur-leica-most-influent... In terms of compression as a whole, the first example would probably be military/commercial codebooks. A relatively modern example would be the q-code, where a predetermined sequence of words are encoded as a 3-letter sequence ("QRA" becomes "What is the name of your vessel/station") but I'm sure there are prior examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code
- paulmd 8y ago
  (or, as the kids would say, 'new telegraph who dis?') Here's a link I found on some early codebooks: http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/codebook/index.htm http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/codebook/index.htm

fanf2 8y ago

A super interesting 1960s intersection between microfiche and digital technology: the IBM 1360 photostore: http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.dir/index.html http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Photostore.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 This was a machine capable of storing a terabit of data on write-once photographic film. It wrote to the film using a scanning electron beam, and then developed the film using a fully automated film processing lab, and finally stored the film cartridges in a robotic storage library. Amazingly cool, but required a lot of expert maintenance and diligent cleaning.

jhbadger 8y ago
And the early versions of the PLATO educational computing system used a computer-controlled microfiche reader to display graphics beyond what was possible at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  It's as though we got so busy using all of this stuff to do ordinary things that we kept making the same thing (GUI, net) better and better, but forgot to keep trying new , richer ideas. As Plato attempted to do. That came out of the U. of Illinois. Where'd the visionary academics go?
  - canhascodez 8y ago
    I believe that the idea that the end of some avenue of human ingenuity has been reached, and your implicit statement of differing values between the past and present, are both perennially recurrent throughout history. It's not necessarily a bad thing if today's academics are pursuing things that are not among your interests, and it's more likely than not that the speed of the dissemination of ideas, the recognition of their value, and their broad application has not appreciably changed in recent decades (assuming that it's more meaningful to talk about that in terms of a "March of Progress" than a "Random Walk of Progress"). I would think it most reasonable to assume that the academics are where they have always been, doing the same arcane and incomprehensible things that academics have always done, and that any appearance to the contrary was a fault of my own perspective.

Animats 8y ago

Newer microfilm may last 500 years, but the older stuff, especially Kalvar film, has serious life problems. Kalvar film gives off volatiles which corrode everything around it except Kalvar film.

ggm 8y ago

Vax/VMS source, on microfiche. Hunt the bugs in Bliss32. Happy days.

crazy_monkey 8y ago

Stone tablets last 2 millenniums... A better idea is to make multiple copies and store them far away in case the warehouse burns down.