The year is 2245. The heirs finally locate a working, antique reader that can handle the ancient USB key, hoping to find great-great-grandpa’s crypto-wallet or the pin-code to a long-lost Maltese bank account.
Instead, they find a 4-bit, VGA-quality scan of Miss October.
An actual book stores more data than that and for longer. At that point, why not just etch the data onto a metal plate or something? 8K is only a few pages of text at 12pt. It could easily fit onto two sides of a small-ish metal plate, etched in 8pt or so, and it would last, potentially, for millennia.
I think the idea is to improve upon this tech so the capacity would become larger.
What’s the practical benefit of that? If the point is long-term storage, rewriting isn’t a priority (or possibly even a need). And this isn’t designed for capacity.
- Print out 8KB on high quality paper.
- Store in good environment…
just print something like a QR code in absurd resolution and read it in a document scanner, a single sheet of A4 should be able to fit quite a lot of data.
I was curious, so I looked it up and it seems that around 3KB is the max for a single 177x177 code (though I imagine this is a “soft” limit?). With 600DPI being common for laser printers, a DPI-limited 3KB would be well under 1cm x 1cm. My hunch is that this wouldn’t be super reliable (DPI limit not necessarily the resolution of the printer?), but I’d be curious to see what the usable QR density actually is. But yeah…a few QR codes should do the trick!
So your 8KB of data will last forever, but what about the firmware required to access it running on flash?
As the old saying goes: What could a person need more than 8KB for?