Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium (theatlantic.com) 94
Millions of publications -- not to mention spy documents -- can be read on microfilm machines. But people still see these devices as outmoded and unappealing. From a report: I recently acquired a decommissioned microfilm reader. My university bought the reader for $16,000 in 1998, but its value has depreciated to $0 in their official bookkeeping records. Machines like it played a central role in both research and secret-agent tasks of the last century. But this one had become an embarrassment. The bureaucrats wouldn't let me store the reader in a laboratory that also houses a multimillion-dollar information-display system. They made me promise to "make sure no VIPs ever see it there." After lots of paperwork and negotiation, I finally had to transport the machine myself. Unlike a computer -- even an old one -- it was heavy and ungainly. It would not fit into a car, and it could not be carried by two people for more than a few feet. Even moving the thing was an embarrassment. No one wanted it, but no one wanted me to have it around either.
And yet the microfilm machine is still widely used. It has centuries of lasting power ahead of it, and new models are still being manufactured. It's a shame that no intrigue will greet their arrival, because these machines continue to prove essential for preserving and accessing archival materials. [...] Microfilm's decline intensified with the development of optical-character-recognition (OCR) technology. Initially used to search microfilm in the 1930s, Emanuel Goldberg designed a system that could read characters on film and translate them into telegraph code. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
And yet the microfilm machine is still widely used. It has centuries of lasting power ahead of it, and new models are still being manufactured. It's a shame that no intrigue will greet their arrival, because these machines continue to prove essential for preserving and accessing archival materials. [...] Microfilm's decline intensified with the development of optical-character-recognition (OCR) technology. Initially used to search microfilm in the 1930s, Emanuel Goldberg designed a system that could read characters on film and translate them into telegraph code. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
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Sears Roebuck, ftw.
Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:5, Insightful)
If the film will last 500 years, then don't get rid of it. But if the reader takes several people to move then it seems suitable for an upgrade. A transport mechanism for the film along with a camera to display the film on a computer or monitor would seem to be the way to go. It also wouldn't seem to to be too hard to have the reader be able to count frames, making quick access to go forward or back semi-automated.
Re:Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:5, Informative)
Digital microfilm readers are a thing, and about the size and weight of a dinner plate.
An empty one.
Re:Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link [stimaging.com].
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The microfilm readers that my university had in the library weren't too different from a gaming monitor today. There was a little tray at the bottom under the middle of the screen. You put the microfilm sheet in there, then moved around a lever that slid that tray around so that the selected page was projected up into the screen.
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There is a slight difference between microfilm and microfiche. Microfilm is on a spool. You are describing microfiche, which on a sheet. I used to, on occasion, make that crap 40 years ago. Messy process with all the photographic chemicals.
Re:Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:1)
Probably because the reader will outlast any extant smartphone, and can actually be maintained.
Re: Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:2)
Re: Keep the media, upgrade the reader (Score:4)
Actually, up grade the media too. I watched a documentary how they are preserving documents on etched sapphire. Supposed to have a shelf life in the billions of years.
I was expecting it to be a digital disk, basically a big ass cdrom. I was surprised when it was explained that it was basically ordinary microfilm process. The reason was excellent too. Basically, if civilization blew itself back to the stone age, we could read the disks with a basic magnifying glass.
Re:Microfilm reader (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a projector. These fools picked up a 500lb projector for "$16,000 in 1998." When its put like that, there doesnt seem to be much of a story here. Its more of a lesson.
Re: Microfilm reader (Score:2)
It probably ALSO includes a photographic printer (for high-res, high-quality copies), which would increase the complexity and weight quite a bit. Even if it did Kodak-style B&W "activator" development, the print path would have been pretty complex since the goal was "push-button, print-comes-out" simplicity for users.
I remember those readers... even back in the early 90s, my university charged $1.00/page to print microfilm & microfiche, back when normal copiers were 10c-25c/page (sometimes, 5c-9c if
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It probably ALSO includes a photographic printer (for high-res, high-quality copies)
OK I'm with you
which would increase the complexity and weight quite a bit.
oh.. on second thought... not with you at all. We are talking about a purchase in 1998, not 1978. The complexity of printers had already been reduced to being disposable cartridge.
What may be on their grossly expensive device is a way to force people to pay for their copies. A slot for quarters, a bill reader, etc. Now we are talking about weight because we are talking about security. I imagine many of the public libraries in the country have/had a film reader like this.
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Microfilm/fiche printing is still an
Re: Microfilm reader (Score:1)
These are optical devices, not digital ones. You arent going to get images to pop out on your hp laserjet.
Bureaucrats (Score:3)
Re:Bureaucrats (Score:5, Insightful)
It is all very romantic until you have to actually use one because some âoebureaucratâ refuses to get his collection digitized and a task that would take twenty minutes on a computer takes up the whole afternoonâ"if you are lucky enough to work with well-organized data, that is.
That's what I'm thinking, if I had an actual microfilm it'd go through the scanner once, be stored as PDF on a HDD and go back into the vault permanently or at least until you lost your last "normal" backup. How many microfilms can you store on a 10TB HDD?
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How many microfilms can you store on a 10TB HDD?
Will your 10TB HDD still be readable in 100 years?
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Probably. But who cares? The film is in the vault if the media ever gets lost. The film won't be readable in 100 years if it's in constant use.
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Uh, try like 10-15 years.
Re:Bureaucrats (Score:4, Funny)
It was fun and nostalgic and cool to show my teenage daughter 20th C tech but I would have preferred a PDF of the 500 pages on that reel. The documents were scribbled in 1836 and I will take months to transcribe them. I want to print them out on paper and transcribe when time comes.
Some of the pages are very faint because whoever filmed them got some light settings wrong. Today we could rescan in full color and read them better.
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HDDs are probably not the best long term storage medium. The mechanical parts degrade, they are vulnerably to magnetic fields, and if they fail the chances of being able to fix them in a decade or more are low unless you have serious cash and equipment available. Even the data encoding format on the discs is proprietary so building your own reader will be tricky.
BluRay is probably the best all round option for now. Archival grade BluRay is cheap and robust. No moving parts, no issues with magnets, the stand
digital longevity (Score:4, Insightful)
It is all very romantic until you have to actually use one because some “bureaucrat” refuses to get his collection digitized and a task that would take twenty minutes on a computer takes up the whole afternoon—if you are lucky enough to work with well-organized data, that is.
It takes time and money to digitize a large collection of analogue data.
They can budget to digitized and index / OCR everything at a certain rate ("x" rolls per week), but they may not get to the part of the collection that you're interested in right away. However, once you request particular roll(s), then they can perhaps push that up to the top of a stack on an ad hoc basis for future researchers. They can put the original analogue stuff back into storage.
I'm reminded of the Digital Doomsday Book in the UK that could not be read after 15 years, but the original from 1086 still accessible:
As a result, no one can access the reams of project information - equivalent to several sets of encyclopaedias - that were assembled about the state of the nation in 1986. By contrast, the original Domesday Book--an inventory of eleventh-century England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks--is in fine condition in the Public Record Office, Kew, and can be accessed by anyone who can read and has the right credentials.
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
How much stuff was / is out there in Flash video format? How many DDS-1 tape readers are there, with an interface (IDE? SCSI-2?) that can connect to modern computers?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Magnetic_tape_data_formats
Bean counters ruin everything (Score:2)
Re:Bean counters ruin everything (Score:4, Informative)
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It cant depreciate to zero until the lenses are sold. Amateur astronomers will drop a good chunk of change on their objective lenses.
Deprecation is an accounting mechanism, not market value. Basically can I keep this as an asset on my balance sheet or to I have to write it off as an expense on my profit & loss. There are strict rules so that companies don't inflate their profits by over-valuing assets that are actually consumed/worn out over time like say furniture, office equipment, company cars etc. while "hidden assets" that are already written off are okay from an accounting perspective. For example presenting future income from
COM Cameras (Score:5, Interesting)
Around 1980 I got a job as a COM Camera Operator.
This was a job mounting tapes on cameras, loading the job and film canister, and pulling the tape and film canister. The tapes held the data transported from a data center. The camera displayed and 'shot' the data onto 105mm film that became the master to produce microfiche from.
We were a Service Bureau so we got tapes in from companies all over the region. Many companies had their permanent financial records shot to microfiche.
Some jobs came in daily, weekly, or quarterly. The film masters produced on silver halide film, were then duplicated on diazo film (ammonia process, the same chemical process as used for blueprints) to produce the 'use' copies of microfiche.
The 'dupers' were a lower tier in the labor at the COM shop.
Some of the cameras were proprietary, but the other group of cameras (called the Betas for some reason) incorporated a PDP-8 minicomputer as their controller. The data tapes were either 800, 1600, or the new high density 6250 bpi tapes.
What a coincidence! (Score:5, Funny)
Around 1980, I got a job as an LPT Camera Operator!
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I predict 75% of Slashdotters are too young to get the joke.
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I predict 75% of Slashdotters are too young to get the joke.
Then explain it please?
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Around 1980 I got a job as a COM Camera Operator.
Around 1980, I got a job as an LPT Camera Operator!
I predict 75% of Slashdotters are too young to get the joke.
Then explain it please?
I imagine it involves COM [wikipedia.org] vs. LPT [wikipedia.org] ports.
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COM ports are still alive and well. Okay, they are often USB to COM port now rather than PCI or ISA to COM port, but for example Windows 10 made major improvements to the USB COM port driver.
RS232 is still very much a thing, especially in industry. It's robust, easy, everything has it or can add it at minimal cost... Perhaps USB's biggest failing was being too complex and frankly a bit half baked in the early days.
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indeed the readers I've worked with weighed 50 kgs, normal man who isn't a lazy out of shape cripple can carry them.
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Allow me (Score:5, Informative)
Much as I like The Atlantic, I will not click on this obvious clickbait bullshit slashvertisement.
TFA had exactly 1 paragraph out of 17 related to its own title:
Their longevity was another matter. As early as May 17, 1964, as reported in The New York Times, microfilm appeared to degrade, with “microfilm rashes” consisting of “small spots tinged with red, orange or yellow” appearing on the surface. An anonymous executive in the microfilm market was quoted as saying they had “found no trace of measles in our film but saw it in the film of others and they reported the same thing about us.” The acetate in the film stock was decaying after decades of use and improper storage, and the decay also created a vinegar smell—librarians and researchers sometimes joked about salad being made in the periodical rooms. The problem was solved by the early 1990s, when Kodak introduced polyester-based microfilm, which promised to resist decay for at least 500 years.
The original linked article [nytimes.com] from the New York Times in 1964 is actually far more interesting.
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The original linked article [nytimes.com] from the New York Times in 1964 is actually far more interesting.
I know slashdot is a little behind sometimes, but 1964? That's pushing it.
you don't need the machines (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason people don't want those ungainly machines is because they don't need them. You can get all the durability of microfilm storage without the bulk or complexity of the old-style camera or reader by using digital microfilm recorders and digital microfilm readers. A digital microfilm reader is about the size of a cigar box and hooks up via USB to your PC.
If you're preparing for a post-apocalyptic world, you can still always read those films with a simple handheld microscope.
Microfilm or microfiche? (Score:3)
I have used both (a very long time ago), but I remember always hating the film compared to fiche. Random access always wins in my book...
Overhead projectors... (Score:5, Interesting)
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OMicrosoft!
Go fiche (Score:2)
Printing a microfilm copy of everything as a backup and storing it in two or more safe places is the essential step. The aliens millennia from now can worry about re-inventing microfilm readers when they dig out the lunar vault where our backups are saved.
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that's the beauty of microfiche, the document is reduced to 1/25th its original size. You could make a "reader" out of tech the Islamic Golden Age had (those guys were smart, things like Snell's law...guess what Snell was late to the party)
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We once had a kind of hobby project in a computer magazin, where they printed out data on endless paper in a kind of barcode (little squares). To read in the 'backup' you would use a scanner, and the software to analyse it back.
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Maybe you should click on the story link...
Obsolete technology (Score:1)
Kinda young, eh? (Score:2)
"Unlike a computer -- even an old one -- it was heavy and ungainly."
Just how young are you? I can remember taking a disk drive out of a PDP-11 rack and it took two adults to manhandle the drive.
I'm gonna guess you can't drive a stick shift either....
Scanning everything to Digital Sounds Great. BUT.. (Score:1)
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I work with a non-profit with just about 60 years worth of archives. In chatting with our archivist, we have set the following rules for what we archive digitally:
1) All data must be in open/publicly documented formats, and preferably those that already have a long history.
2) Filenames and directory structure must be desriptive. If the format supports metadata, it must be filled in.
3) The data is migrated to new media every 2 years.
4) Truly important documents (articles of incorporation, insurance paperwork
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So what are you whining about? You can run dos 2.11 and windows 1.01 in a VM too. Or old OS/2.
There is no problem. You don't have a problem.
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I do agree with your point about the other low tech benefits. Although that seems to be more about data that we want to preserve post apocalypse. Guessing the data format of a
It reminds me of... (Score:3)
Objections: Speculation and Citation Needed (Score:2)
The first micrographic experiments, in 1839, reduced a daguerreotype image down by a factor of 160.
The problem was solved by the early 1990s, when Kodak introduced polyester-based microfilm, which promised to resist decay for at least 500 years.
The math may be a bit fuzzy, but I'm about certain it hasn't yet been half a millennium since the earliest Microfilm, let alone the improved Kodak version claimed to last 500 years.
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You should educate yourself then on how media lifetime expectancy is made for various types.
M-disk? (Score:1)
Only since the 90's (Score:2)
According to the article, the 500-year film was developed in the 1990s, when microfilm was being phased out everywhere. That doesn't leave a lot of 500-year microfilm out there!