Paper storage is back

JUST WHEN it seemed that the paperless office was a possibility, An Indian designer has worked out a way to stick more than 256GB of data storage on an A4 piece of paper.

Sainul Abideen has worked out a way that data can be encoded into coloured geometric shapes and stored in dense patterns on paper.

The method stores text, images, sounds and video clips as coloured circles, triangles, squares and prints them on dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch.

If the paper is read though a scanner, the contents can be decoded and viewed or played.

The technology, dubbed 'Rainbow' by its inventor works because printed text is a wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data. If you printing the data encoded in a denser way much higher capacities can be achieved.

Abideen has shown off a 45-second video clip being encoded on a paper video disk and put 432 A4 pages stored on a two-inch by two-inch square of paper, it says here. µ