Archival storage

[der Mouse]

>> Paper may actually not be totally out of the question.  With decent
>> printing technology you can get about 75dpi with fairly clear
>> readability.
> As we've flogged many times before, "Which printing technology"?

Ink.  Real ink, the kind that actually soaks into paper fibers.  (On
decently sized paper, too, so it doesn't fuzz out significantly.)

You know, the sort of thing they use for printing quality books.  Go
find a copy of the Encylopædia Britannica for an example.

> Laser printer toner has characteristics that make it unsuitable (such
> as the way it'll transfer from page to page when pressed tightly).
> Ink jets are soluble.  Dye sub?  Wax transfer?

It doesn't have to be anything currently available in a mass-market
computer printer (which you didn't explicitly say, but all your
examples are).

> Not cheap, not easy,

Nothing for storing that much data with anything like the durability
ink-on-paper offers will be, I suspect.

> not even reliable - and considering you'd need to develop new forms
> of paper-reading equipment and software to retrieve it.

New equipment?  Hardly, not as long as some kind of decent-resolution
digital photography is available.  Software?  Perhaps, but not very - I
have a 300dpi scanner next to my monitor, and I believe I could cobble
something together in no more than a few days to turn (scans of) such
pages into a big array o' bits.  (And from there, it would depend on
the encoding algorithms, which is why I specifically mentioned
documenting them on directly human readable pages.)

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