Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Thinking back on the experience, it was incredible. I could go grab a copy of a newspaper from any particular day in any year. I remember reading the actual newspapers from the early 20th century. Big historical events that are in history books, really take on a different meaning to you when you read them as they were reported in near-real-time. The ability of microfilm to snapshot history in a way different than say viewing a jpg or png, is fascinating.
If you are ever bored, and can find a library that will give you access, you should definitely check it out. It's an experience I think all hackers should have. Such simple yet powerful machines, built on a highly non-technical system of convention. Very cool. Sorry for the long walk down nostalgia lane.
Perhaps a Google project like the books scanning they did? That would be really cool.
* it doesn't have to be non-profit tech org of course (I did mention google's book project after all), but finding a for-profit that would make things freely available might be a challenge in itself since the costs would not likely be low, either for development or infrastructure/maintenance.
The library systems in the last two places I lived both subscribed to services where when you put your library card number in, you could browse the archives of hundreds of newspapers, magazines and journals. Some of them going back into the 1800's.
There's also "Chronicling America" - it's a federal government (Library of Congress) web site that has full page scans of 500 different newspapers from 1836-1922. Free and open to everyone in the world: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
It's open source at https://github.com/dougkoellmer/swarm if anyone wants to throw money at me to continue developing it. :)
I found it to be a revelatory experience. The news, ultimately, is just stories. It's not a definitive or objective account of what's happening in the world, it's just industrialized gossip with a veneer of legitimacy. Without the sense of urgency that comes with newness, it's often remarkably dull. The news shows you the variance, but not the trend; someone who caught up on current events only once a year would probably have a better sense of where the world is headed than someone who checks the news every day. Some stories that were huge dramas at the time are now long forgotten; some stories that barely registered at the time eventually turned out to be part of a crucial change in society.
Or it may be that people have a hard time to figure out what matters at any given moment in time - you never quite know how a news item will play out - will it become part of History or will it turn out to be just another detail? go figure when it is happening...
Maybe grandparent is just right: when it is all happening people may be more honest than after the fact, when positions are clear and everyone has to justify his own stake in the grand puzzle.
It's called "the news", not "the importants". Unusual, shocking and lurid stories are much more likely to be newsworthy, but by definition they aren't representative of what is actually happening in the world. Our perception of the world is much more strongly influenced by emotive anecdotes than cold hard facts. Violent crime rates in the western world have been significantly declining for decades, but most people believe that the opposite is true; multiple studies have found a correlation between news consumption and the perception of high crime. It's very difficult for the news media to usefully communicate important but gradual trends - rising incomes across the developing world, wage stagnation in the developed world, the impact of climate change, demographic shifts, the erosion of civil society etc.
I think that most journalists are well-intentioned and genuinely believe that they are seekers of truth, but they operate in a system that reflects our innate perceptual biases, our acquired cultural biases and the commercial exigencies of media organisations.
Another useful experiment is to exclusively consume another country's news media for a week or two, preferably a country you know very little about. A week of reading a Ugandan or Nigerian newspaper provides a very different perspective on world events.
If you have access to microfilm, instructive is an article from June 23, 1918 titled "Lenine ready to resign". Of course this was another false story - although he was shot two months later which caused an illness in him that caused him to slowly withdraw until his death five years after.
But there are many stories of this type. Ultimately, however, dominant communist power in Russia ended because Russian communists themselves decided to hold Multi-Party elections (to be even more tangential - some think Lenin would have had a coalition government of Bolsheviks and left socialist revolutionaries if he had not been shot and retired to Gorki).
> I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm
You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?
Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent? I don't mean one link to one article, which tells us nothing about an overall trend. Ironically, there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless.
This was not the case when I did this thirty years ago.
> You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?
I concur with your observation that if you stop reading that sentence after the first few words, it makes less sense than if you read the whole sentence.
> Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent?
I already did.
> I don't mean one link to one article
August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.
> there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless
I have received ceaseless upvotes for my comments on the lies the Times has told about Russia over the past century, and I wish to thank the товарищи who gave them to me - from wherever they are in the world.
That doesn't establish anything in the original claim. First, the quote says the government left Moscow; it didn't say the government collapsed permanently. Similarly, saying De Gaulle fled France doesn't say that France's free government had collapsed permanently. It would have been false to say Mao and the Chinese Communists didn't flee to northwest China (the Long March); should the newspaper have reported that they were in Beijing? Are you saying the Bolshevik government didn't leave Moscow? Can you provide a basis for that? Second, it's just one headline and you had claimed a trend that lasted for years; one headline, even if mistaken, is not a sign of bias; nobody would say that newspapers are perfect and errors happen for many reasons. Finally, it's from a century ago; I don't see what it says about anything current; does the Russian government of 100 years ago tell us about the current organization? Does IBM of 100 years ago tell us how the current organization functions?
The analysis shows how seriously misleading was the Times by its reliance on the offical purveyors of information. It indicates that statements of fact emanating from governments and the circles around governments cannot be taken as judgements of fact by an independent press. They indicate opinion, they are controlled by special purpose, and they are not trustworthy news.
Even more problematic than official sources, the authors continue, are the semi-official anyomous reports often relied upon.
All the more reason to shun official Information Ministers and Spokesmen, press briefings, and the like.
The quote comes from "A Test of the News", the researchers were Walter Lippman and Charles Merz, the publication The New Republic, and the date, August 4, 1920.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
https://archive.org/stream/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews/Lippma...
Does any library not have this stuff? It seems absolutely standard for universities, the main/research branches of public library systems, etc. Even my small suburban branch library had a microfilm collection and a few readers.
However newer libraries, particularly in affluent areas, are more likely to go to a digital stack since it will be more readily searched and comprehensively indexed.
But as a digital native myself, I'm disappointed that they failed to emphasize the biggest advantage of digital information storage - the fact that data can be copied perfectly, as many times as you want. Analog microfilm cannot be copied perfectly - the original is always better than the copy. This means the microfilm is a unique artifact that needs to be preserved and taken care of. One disaster, one fire, or one careless handler, and the object is damaged.
With digital technology, we pay a high price in the lines of code to build an application and interface, to specify seemingly opaque binary file formats, to have physical media (floppy, CD, etc.) go obsolete in a decade, and to build complex CPUs - but never forget that what we gain is the tremendous ability to copy perfectly. This is what allows us to share a file with someone and know that their copy is a perfect backup for mine in case mine is lost. This is what allows us to transfer files from old, slow, unreliable media (e.g. floppy disks) to new, fast media (e.g. SSDs) without missing a beat. This is why we can take a sizable collection of a thousand audio CDs and cram them into one convenient hard disk drive (as WAV, not MP3), with the exact same audio quality. This is why we can transmit files over the Internet - we surely can't transmit analog data over a distance without a high risk of degradation.
If we collectively accept that storing information digitally with the ability to make perfect copies is worth the effort, then there are things we can do to improve the status quo. We need to make it easier to find and manage file duplicates - otherwise it's hard to know whether a copied file has been modified or not. We need emphasize building applications on open standards. We need to make file format specifications accessible, well-defined, and easier to understand. We need to make systems that have low implementation complexity (e.g. CPU with few transistors, OS with few lines of code) to show what is the minimum knowledge needed to reboot the technology.
While microfilm may last 500 years, digital data could truly be forever - as long as you copy it periodically.
Tangentially, this makes me wonder: While microfilm can't be copied perfectly, isn't it true that the source quality (e.g. the crispness of the print) is vastly lower than the resolution of the medium itself? Which seems like it would imply that the "lossy" transformation might in some sense still lossless, at least for a while - like converting a high bitrate mp3 recording of a radio broadcast into a lower bitrate one. Or perhaps the kinds of loss are different. I'm sure I'm confusing a lot of ideas and butchering some terms here.
The way digital copying gets around this problem is by having predefined signal levels that are farther apart than the vast majority of copying error, and writing a new master every time instead of the analog copy.
There is a potential catch, in that analog copies will tend to introduce some amount of physical errors no matter how much the hypothetical increase in definition should allow for perfection. Subsequent copies, no matter how high their quality, will both tend to amplify these errors and introduce new ones. You get a similar result if you repeatedly re-endcode data even in high-fidelity lossy ways - each encode introduces artifacts and amplifies previous artifacts.
It's an intriguing idea! Thank you for bringing it forth for discussion.
It is part of the "Object Lesson" series - "Each Object Lessons project will start from a specific inspiration: an anthropological query, ecological matter, archeological discovery, historical event, literary passage, personal narrative, philosophical speculation, technological innovation—and from there develop original insights around and novel lessons about the object in question." - http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/about/
The object in question is microfilm readers, and the things we might learn from it. Not digital technology, nor the reasons why microfilm went by the wayside.
In practice though, I think you could take your idea even further into the realm of lossy compression. If you're scanning newsprint for instance, the vast majority of the page is either 1) text in a known font or 2) images rendered through halftoning, that is a regular pattern of circles wih some finite range of radii. Conceivably a system intelligent enough to recognise and encode this information might even be considered a higher fidelity scan than a simple photo, as it will repair incidental defects from the printing process.
I agree on open standards and deduplication, I hope content addresable archiving will get more mainstream, IPFS brings big hopes.
Your operating system does this.
The data encoded in the steganography, could be any data of course, but for our purposes, it would be the image itself.
Such a picture could be copied, with loss, in an analog fashion, but could also be copied perfectly in a digital fashion, by a digital reader capable of reading out the steganography information. Even the analog copy could be digitally read if it was of high enough quality.
Another, more straightforward, way would be to print on the film, first an analog rendition of the picture, then a digitally encoded pattern of the same image, rinse repeat.
But from a future safe perspective, it could be smart to encode the data itself inside the image, as per the first paragraph. Someone copying the images could unwittingly copy the digital data too!
This was an intriguing idea, but after I did some back of the envelope rough numbers, I tentatively concluded microform might not encode densely enough to accomplish that. It already has poor fidelity characteristics for photographic data. Right off the bat you are losing lots of information during the reducing process, and the film itself does not have the kind of qualities photographers look for. Color microform is also much more expensive than black and white. So the color film works well for newsprint photos, but for archival grade purposes, we're likely better off with the original film negatives. For deep storage archives, I could see a use case for microform, and with the encoding you suggested, but not quite at one picture per frame (page).
Steganography relies upon imperceptibly embedding information into the picture, so there is a very low encoding density limit because we're working with analog pictures. Optar at 600 ppi uses an entire page to encode 200 Kb, but microfilm is closer to 300 ppi, so at 100 percent density with no picture, we can expect around 100 Kb per page of Optar-encoded binary data. An average smartphone picture size these days is around 5 MB, closer to 15-50 MB for DSLR pictures.
Optar-encoding the smartphone picture, we are around 50 pages before we scatter it into the picture to steganographically encode it. Already we can see the picture has to be blown up across more than 50 pages and stitched back together. At imperceptible levels of encoding density, I'm guessing we're looking at 500+ pages, maybe. A standard microfiche holds about 98 pages, so we're talking about 6'ish fiches per picture at cellphone grade, much more for DSLR grade picture encoding.
For high quality archival photograph storage, I think current librarians have it right: lots of duplicates of negatives, geographically separated, then service copy negatives off those masters, digitally scan in the most-used pictures off the service copy, and let patrons use the digital copies. Migrate the digital copies until we establish a universally-accepted digital bootstrap mechanism and process for Long Now-span time scales.
Isn't it specific to magnetic media only? (I don't think optical discs susceptible to bit rot. Especially M-discs which are said to last for a thousand years.)
Any EPROM/EEPROM/Flash will leak charge from its cells and eventually lose data if not periodically refreshed. Even some mask ROMs develop bad bits over time due to latent manufacturing defects.
Many CD-Rs and DVD-Rs recorded ~15-20 years ago already have uncorrectable errors (due to the dye degrading?). Pressed discs are nominally immune, but may have manufacturing defects that lead to progressive failure (e.g. "laser rot" on LaserDiscs manufactured by certain plants).
Would a good solution for /really/ long term storage be a kind of WORM ROM based on fuses that could be burned to 'program' a given area? (I think some EPROM might be this, but I'm talking about more storage density than even current top end flash drives.) Obviously you'd only want to use this for the LONG term storage, but if it's cheep enough I could see it being useful in the same use cases that existing optical media were and even in roles like backup / audit logs.
https://www.archives.gov/preservation/technical/storage-stra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation
The Internet Archives preferred bmedium for book storage is ... books.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archi...
Quartz glass is a proposed medium, with a potential life of 300 million years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/data-saved-quartz...
(That being said, digital copies would be way more useful here and now; let's do both!)
(This wasn't a joke back then. Everybody remembered the wrecked cities of WWII. They had to be built back up. You might need those instructions.)
Is this actually a thing in American memory, given that no American city was bombed in WWII?
> Is this actually a thing in American memory, given that no American city was bombed in WWII?
To veer off-topic a bit, I think this is an interesting question brings up two important points:
First, as the WWII generation has died out, people seem to have become less averse to war and to care less about the institutions built to prevent it (the UN, EU, international law, etc.). They were built because the survivors of WWII thought war was the worst scourge of humanity, and that another war - with ~1945 technology - could destroy civilization.
Second, the U.S. experienced very little direct harm in WWII, and even the overseas casualties were orders of magnitude less than those of the European and Asian countries (e.g., the U.S. lost 200,000; the USSR lost 20 million). If the worst happens and the U.S. fights another major war, the enemy likely will be able to strike the U.S. with missiles. Even North Korea can do it to a limited degree.
With the loss of the WWII generation, I think Americans have become cavalier about war, and because the WWII didn't affect the U.S. nearly as badly as the Europe and East Asia, they don't conceive of a different kind of war, such as one where missiles rain down on every American city. We can assume the Bay Area would be a priority target, for example; it's hard to imagine what that would be like; it's hard to imagine the consequences of it.
Yeah, all except the first one. I'm not gonna argue with the gushing passion for all things digital in the rest of your comment, but I will first of all, point out that putting your photos, music, and videos in the cloud is absolutely not an exact copy--cloud providers don't have ToS that cover the compression that they apply to your media. There's no telling how badly they'll compress it to make room for the newest stuff years from now.
Since you offered such an untempered view of digital media as the ultimate achievement of human civilization, I'd like to offer an alternative viewpoint that recognizes that digital copies reduce very deep, meaningful experiences down to very meaningless bits. That's great for newspaper articles, but it's no way to live life. Just yesterday I was sitting in the park under a tree. The winds were blowing, thousands of leaves dancing above, and distantly a church bell began tolling, it's bang-clang rolling and washing through and around the boughs, being buffeted by the wind itself. The boughs are laden with leaves and seeds, and the sound waves are muffled at a turn, coming through at a turn, as this branch shakes and wags between the bells and me. The sun is filtered and flickered, I see the veins of leaves through. The insects buzz. One shield-like bug, as thin as a blade and about the size of a fingernail, lands and waddles around my blanket, its six legs hyper-optimized by evolution. There are perhaps 10,000 such creatures in this field. A trillion generations to produce it. It starts, its wings buzzing a thousand times a second. The hundreds of thousands of blades of grass wag in waves like grain, like carpet, like kelp in a fishtank, and they too, rustle. Could digital media capture this? I move my head to the side, angle it up, cup my ears, and I sense this field...I am absolutely surrounded by information. The amount information is incredible. I could hear the scrapes of the leaves against each other and the audio shadows of them as they blow around in front of this bell! I can hear the bells harmonics, and in my mind I see the sound waves racing round its circumference, overlaid with other harmonics making it jiggle like a waterballoon. The information there is 10^30...10^40. We can't even imagine.
And yet, we are told that VR and digital media will usher us into a wonderful world of entertainment. Pah! Lossless copies. Pah! We cannot even capture a millionth of something like that.
Those who've seen the 60s George Pal version of "Time Machine" will remember The Traveller spinning a disk on a flat surface to activate a voiced playback. Still visionary.
I can view on a light table or project a photographic slide from 1935 just as easily as I can view a slide developed yesterday. On the other hand, it's not a trivial task to read a magnetic tape from the 70's. These days it's not even trivial for me to read a CD, I don't own a CD reader, and if I'm away from my desk I can't even read a USB flash drive on my Macbook Pro.
For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily.
> something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of
Does it really require millions of lines? Even if you’re just targeting that one model of drive, rather than writing a general purpose SATA/USB kernel stack? If what’s on there is, say, JPEG images, libjpeg (plus its dependencies in glibc, I guess) isn’t “millions of lines” either. Where are these millions of lines?
(I’m speaking as someone who has written a unikernel with disk IO and graphics support. It was far less than a million lines!)
It was a puny bit of data for todays standards (about 500M in total), but of the day it was incredible. Back then a mainframe winchester pack with the same capacity would be roughly the size of a washer-dryer combination.
The data not being publicly accessible at the moment is more of a copyright rather than a technical issue.
You can be sure the JPEG and BMP and PNG format will be, and plain text and basic html as well.
So you don't need to print anything, just to have plenty of backup and repeat the backup process every few years (which takes all of 2-3 minutes even for 1000s of images).
There is something to be said for tangible, archival-paper printed photographs.
Maybe printing the top 100 photos each year is a good middle ground, but to each their own :)
That's why I advocated for multiple copies -- and in a redundant format with corrections codes even better.
It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides...
Not that I disagree with you, but this is an interesting point. I've heard archivists argue that with simpler analog storage, the curve for corrupt bits vs interpretability is smoothish, but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore"
Digital anything, really. Analog signals degrade somewhat gracefully—you have to explicitly build error correction into a digital signal.
A relatively recent example of a bungled transition from analog to digital: when the US switched to digital television in 2009, my family suddenly and completely lost many local/lower-powered/more distant stations that we used to be able to get with just a little static or distortion. And the channels we continued to get wou— —ut out occasio— —in a really a—oying wa— and became unwatchable (well, unlistenable).
That's not inherent in digital copies though. It depends on how much redundancy one adds. We've had self-correction codes that sacrifice size for redundancy and reliability since forever, even in simple formats like ZIP and RAR archives.
And with digital one can always make like 10 copies in the same disk too. If one is unreadable due to single bit flipped or a whole sector, some of the others will still be fine.
The problem I have had is that when one is trying to duplicate/copy > 1 Tb of data across tens, if not thousands of files, that the bitrot is not always easy to find. Windows and OS X / MacOS treat bitrot differently and, it seems, across different file types.
And yeah, lots of issues with scratching, discolouration, lost, etc., of any printed or optical media. That's why a hybrid physical-digital solution is a good half-way house. Same goes for encryption keys or one's crypto wallets, best to hedge one's bets over physical and digital media.
Yeah, plenty of backup copies. One can always die on you, and even just 2 is stretching it. And the working ones should be verified and copied to new copies every 3-4 years (but in overall, it's not a big deal).
>The problem I have had is that when one is trying to duplicate/copy > 1 Tb of data across tens, if not thousands of files, that the bitrot is not always easy to find
Yes, but for the order of 100s or 1000s of images (equivalent to those one would be able to print) this shouldn't be a problem though. Tiny HDs, SSDs, and USB drives + MD5 (or better) hashes/CRC codes should do.
This was a machine capable of storing a terabit of data on write-once photographic film. It wrote to the film using a scanning electron beam, and then developed the film using a fully automated film processing lab, and finally stored the film cartridges in a robotic storage library. Amazingly cool, but required a lot of expert maintenance and diligent cleaning.
(As an aside, "documentation" was the hot term in library science in the 1930s. "Documentation" meaning "collection of informational papers" is only from 1927, says https://www.etymonline.com/word/documentation . As a further aside for those involved in science fairs, Watson Davis also founded "the Science Clubs of America, reaching at one point roughly a million school-age children across the United States; he also was one of the originators of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search".
He participated in the World Congress of Universal Documentation. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Universal_Do...
> The World Congress of Universal Documentation was held from 16 to 21 August 1937 in Paris, France. Delegates from 45 countries met to discuss means by which all of the world's information, in print, in manuscript, and in other forms, could be efficiently organized and made accessible. ...
> The main resolution adopted by the congress proposed that microfilm be used to make information universally available.[8] Watson Davis, chairman of the American delegation and president of the ADI, stated that the volume of information being produced created difficult problems of access and preservation, but that these could be solved by the use of microfilm. ...
> In his address to the Congress, H. G. Wells said that he thought that his idea of the "world brain" was a precursor to the ideas other delegates were proposing, and explicitly linked the projects being discussed to the work of the encyclopédistes:
These are all ideas which percolated through Vannevar Bush's Memex and many others to become the modern internet.
Also, one of the co-founders of the ADI was Atherton Seidell. He published a series of articles in Science promoting the use of microfilm. Eg, from 24 August 1934 - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/80/2069/184 .
Are there any combined devices/stations that can be used to both read AND create either microfilm or microfiche?
Most of it, though, you could do now with an "eBay special" camera and lens and a bit of ortho-litho film. It's still available as sheet film. That would mean red reads as black and non-repro blue is a thing. Panchromatic repro work would be a lot harder since Kodak killed off Technical Pan. Tech Pan was kind of super-fast film, though - you'd use it at "ISO" 20-50, depending on the application - so while it was spectacular for general photography, it was just at the edge of what would be useful for microfiche.
Part of the problem is the target market; this was at a financial services company where the supplier knew they could charge pretty much anything they wanted and it would get passed along as a tiny fraction of the end user customer contract cost. If a $100M financial services contract involves a $5K service contract for some obscure accounting thingy no one really cares. Given that situation is similar to pre-consumer era 3-d printing, I figure a really smart hacker who doesn't care about reproducible results or speed or reliability could squirt something out for a tenth the costs; but even at a tenth, thats still going to be "laser cutter" like costs. Film is never cheap; high res film is gonna be worse, just how it is.
I can understand the film/fiche writing machines being hideously expensive, but I have yet to find a reader that is built for the XXI century digital-oriented demographic. Of the readers built recently, they're all expensive, and are designed with firmware, instead of a design orientation of dumb manipulable hardware (preferably with open documentation) driven by modifiable software.
I oft find it interesting how a medium (and/or technology) can fundamentally alter the basic experience of reading.
I'm a gen-x so I'm so old my youth predated even cdroms; in fact I got an off brand early cdrom reader in high school as a very expensive birthday gift. So in early high school I spent a couple weeks reading microfilm of Scientific American magazine searching out all the "amateur scientist" columns from the 50s and 60s, some real gold there. I printed out some interesting columns. Still have some of those printouts. The technology to "photocopy from microfilm" is pretty obvious optically, the image is projected onto what amounts to a xerox photocopier. Of course kids these days may not believe fully analogy photocopiers ever existed, but certainly they did, until relatively recently as digital multifunction devices took over. Around the turn of the century all the Amateur Scientist columns were combined into a multimedia cdrom using turn of the century ancient java to navigate tens of thousands of one-page-per-pdf files. I no longer have infrastructure that can run that old of a java version although hand navigation of an image of the cdrom filesystem is possible (the file names aren't too insane) and I no longer own a desktop or laptop with optical drive to read the legacy disk, although I can, for now, scare up a USB cdrom reader if needed.
I lived near a depository library; did you? If you can get access to a federal depository library then you'll have access to microfilm version of complete ancient census records; I spent a long time looking at those and printing out 1800s era census records. My future wife bought "family tree maker" cdrom custom format disks of census data (this is all pre-internet pre-ancestry.com era by at least a decade). Obviously those custom cdroms of census records are useless today unless you have a complete early 90s PC emulator, and searching online works better and there's been several decades of census data released since then, LOL.
I find it fascinating that I grew up before cdroms, then in my youth cdroms would replace "everything", and now cdroms are a dead media. I'm and not really all that decrepit and old outside of SV hiring standards and ageism, I scarcely have a gray hair, maybe one or two, don't even have any grand kids yet. CDroms may have been born and died in my young adult years, but there's still microfilm out there.
https://gmpphoto.blogspot.com/2018/04/ur-leica-most-influent...
In terms of compression as a whole, the first example would probably be military/commercial codebooks. A relatively modern example would be the q-code, where a predetermined sequence of words are encoded as a 3-letter sequence ("QRA" becomes "What is the name of your vessel/station") but I'm sure there are prior examples.
Here's a link I found on some early codebooks: http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/codebook/index.htm
Edit: Even after disabling ad block, still says that there is no connection. Even worse, just after I actually buy a copy of their magazine.