Talk:HD-Rosetta

Norsam Technologies also worked on a digital recording version of their HD-Rosetta, the HD-ROM, in the the mid 90s. Norsam Technologies teamed up with with IBM in this development ( reference for instance http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/news/hdrom.htm, http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/CC256CED0016AD1ECC25684C000D8A5B, or http://www.thic.org/pdf/Apr98/norsam.jbishop.pdf ).

While the HD-Rosetta project was intended to record images, human-readable text and the like which could be viewed with the appropriate type of microscope, the HD-ROM was intended to record digital data. Both technologies used the particle beam principle to etch structures into a surface. It was expected that a HD-ROM disk the size of a CD-ROM could hold 165 GB.

Limitations

I see some problems with this, especially as a long-term information storage device. At first, I wondered how one can possibly locate any particular page one wanted to read without scanning through all 196,000 pages. I see there is mention made of a "reader" device of some sort that automatically locates the correct page, but it seems to me that this device is far more fragile than the disk itself. Is it reasonable to expect such a device to still be around or usable in the year 9,998? Unlikely. That leaves the poor sap who finds the disk no way to read anything without reading the whole thing. Another problem is "will people even recognize it for what it is in ten-thousand years"? It just looks like a disk of metal. How are they supposed to know that if they put it under a microscope, they will see microscopic pages of info? Will they even HAVE access to a microscope, especially an electron-scanning microscope? A lot of things can happen over 10,000 years. The world may have collapsed and regressed, and they could use all the info to rebuild society...but only if they find the disk, think to use a microscope on it, and have access to one. Anyway, the technology is really cool, but I'm not sure about its practicality. I guess it's better to have the info on SOMETHING, even if its imperfect than to not bother recording it at all...but couldn't they at least use a larger disc, like a manhole cover, something that can be found easily and leaves room to print instructions around the edge in visible characters?.45Colt 18:43, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Separate out the concerns - HD-Rosetta is intended for long-term information storage, not ease of information retrieval. Conventional methods can be used to assist retrieval - an index, for example. How did early Western scholars find the works of the ancient Greeks? Because the works were useful or entertaining they survived. To assist the survivability of an HD-Rosetta disk you could etch beautiful art, or an illustration of the principles of magnification, on the non-data side of the disk and trust that it would be put in a gallery or a private collection. Combined with a "lots of copies" strategy you could be reasonably certain that at least one copy of each disk would be likely to survive. This isn't a discussion forum so I'll stop there but I found your points interesting enough to want to reply! Alex McKee (talk) 07:44, 17 February 2016 (UTC)