At 09:26 AM 2/5/97 -0800, Steve Schear wrote:

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Given that high-density inkjet printers can do 600x600 dpi resolution, it should be possible to achieve the equivalent of 100x100 bpi of easily-recoverable data on ordinary paper. That's about 800 kilobits, or 100 kilobytes. What does ITAR say about this?

I'm not sure if what I did in the 80s, trying to create what I called 'paper ROM, is applicable. In these investigations I used matricies of small (1-3 mm) squares of gray (16 levels) or color (64 levels) with a mind to replace diskettes for inexpensive mass data distribution. I was able to reliably get 100-200 KB/page side using standard offset printing. With modern ink-jet/laser printers you should be able to reliably get at least 10-50KB/page side. Although a technical success, I abandoned the effort when I discovered someone had patented (4,488,679) something similar a few years earlier.

It seems to me that the main impediment to doing this in the middle 1980's was the lack of inexpensive scanners. But the utility of a system like this has, unfortunately (?) or perhaps fortunately, probably been killed by the Internet. Today, a magazine or newspaper can merely post a short pointer to a website including an FTP, or something similar. True, that doesn't guarantee the availability of the data years later, but... Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com