On 01/07/06, Tom Fine wrote:
> I read somewhere that some organization, maybe a government agency,
> was studying printing binary machine language of certain key digital
> documents or software and printing on archival paper, the idea being
> that it would survive a nuclear war and if surviving people could
> somehow construct a computer and punch this stuff in, they'd be able
> to recreate the digital content. Might be sci-fi but I'm pretty sure I
> read it from a reputable news source. This may have been some dot-bomb
> bs in the 90s, however.

If you print 8 dots (bits) in one square mm, that is one byte per square
mm. So 1 Meg requires one square metre, which is 16 A4 pages.

A Gigabyte needs 16000 A4 pages, and 100 Gig (a typical hard drive
today) needs 1,600,000 A4 pages.

So one DVD full needs a library shelf.

(Now somebody tell me I have slipped some decimal places!)

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
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