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Reminds me of Backer32, a piece of hardware that stored data on VHS tapes as black and white squares. https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU?t=815 https://youtu.be/TUS0Z

• dylan604 8y ago
  Never knew about this, but of course it exists! In the digital video tape world, it was common to do backups to tape. The old Flame/Inferno systems would do archives to D1 by laying down all of the video elements including the mattes as video, and then save the actual project code as data afterwards. When played back, it would look like black&white snow/noise. Maybe it was at the beginning, don’t remember exactly. However, at the time, I had just assumed it was just noise, but now wonder if the black&white patterns was the data like a QR code. A blank VHS tape would display static as well, but a blank digital tape would not. That’s what made these archives stand out to me.