Looking for opinions...

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Kevin Parker via cctech wrote:
> I previously worked for an insurance company and a very old issue reared 
> its ugly head. Trouble was all the claim and policy info was on 
> literally a truckload of microfiche and to find anything took three days 
> (seriously) so ICT had them all scanned to PDF and OCR'd - it worked a 
> treat but of course an expensive option depending on volume of course.

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