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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Every few years I remember the story from 2000-2001 claiming that a German research lab successfully stored 10GB WORM on a roll of clear sticky tape ("Scotch" tape).

I couldn't really tell if it was serious or not at the time, but it looks like nothing has come of it.

[1] https://uat.designnews.com/automation-motion-control/tale-ta...

[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/00/03/18/1218250/scotch-tape...

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Oh the good times... I remember when before christmas Steffen and Matthias goofed around in the university basement with their equipment... Actually they pivoted from data storage to security and anti tamper stickers, and are still in business [0, 1].

Steffen Noethe is into life sciences since 2013 [2].

P.S.: It did work for up to five or so layers, then focusing and laser power were hard to handle. They never developed a robust drive from that principle and the spot in between flash, DVDs and tape was closing too fast to create enough business...

[0] https://www.tesa-scribos.com/de [1] https://www.tesa.com/en/about-tesa/press-insights/stories/th... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffen-noehte-b318a728

Thanks for that! I love the power of HN to reach people with personal knowledge about technology.

For anybody else interested, I believe we're talking about this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6386458B1

Just contributing my iota where I can... =:-)

You are right, that is one of them. There's some more even...

[0] https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthias-gerspach

Paper storage was another weird one literally use a sheet of paper to store information. Dots or symbols of some sort and hundreds of gigabytes stored on a sheet of paper.

Mainframe programs used to be loaded from paper tape into memory and then run, so I've read. Maybe same for minicomputers.

Paperback!

http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/

I couldn't recall the application name. Thanks!

I tried it and it did print on paper but it seems the application isn't great on connecting to a modern scanner of a multi-function printer MFP. It's a networked MFP but even with the MFP connected via USB it balks and says no scanner found.

https://i.imgur.com/GJu2GPV.jpg

I was thinking about how it probably hasn't aged well and went off looking for forks or other projects like it. I found this and am considering building it play around: https://git.teknik.io/scuti/paperback-cli

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