Looking for opinions...

On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Kevin Parker via cctech wrote: If only that were 16mm or 35mm continuous rolls, instead of microfiche! In 1931, Emanuel Goldberg, then a chief engineer at Zeiss built the "Statistical Machine". By recording bits optically in the margins of microfilm, and reading them with photocells, it could find appropriate frames! For use in soundtrack for films, Mauer puts up to 8 parallel variable area optical tracks in the margin! 8 bit parallel! Goldberg was also apparently responsible for the Contax camera. BUT, in the days leading up to World War Two, he fled Dresden and Zeiss could not afford to have mention of a Jew in a high profile position, and by the time the war ended, they had systematically erased most clues that he had existed! http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldberg.html A decade later, Vannevar Bush stole the idea, and without credit, claimed it as his own, as the foundation for his Memex device. Bush did not successfully build his machine. Bush's Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think" is sometimes considered the foundation of modern information science. Bush did not understand nor accept the concepts of index nor hierarchical organization, so he pushed for linkage to go from one topic into another. Ted Nelson credits it as the inspiration for Hypertext, and Cern credits Ted nelson. Alas, the volume of data involved precludes reels of microfilm, and the only hope for access is manually cataloging titles of the cards, followed eventually by linking to images on the web, and eventual OCR of the text portions. How many page images will fit on a 3TB drive? How many can we store and retrieve in the MTBF? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com