What is DOTS?

group47.com

23 points·tobr··10 comments

I watched the whole thing so you don't have to:

1. A DOTS reader looks sort of like an external DVD/tape/floppy drive

2. Data is recoverable not via just a DOTS reader, but with a normal camera/microscope if need be. Imagine a mixture of QR codes and logos, like a business card might have.

3. Instructions on reading DOTS data and building an actual DOTS reader can be "drawn" on the medium itself in a human interpretable form (see: Voyager record)

4. DOTS media is essentially a piece of durable metal that takes precise and dense impressions from a laser, which makes it mostly immune to things like EMP blasts, chemicals, extreme temperatures, etc

5. No price is listed, but the media block shown was 1.2TB

I think you could read a CD-ROM with a microscope, in theory.

Ah, but do you have a white paper?

Not without a copy of the Yellow Book. A cool feature of DOTS and Piql is that documentation is stored on every tape.

Over a TB is pretty impressive for truly shelf-stable storage

Sounds cool but it's frustrating to see no dates or signs of progress on the site. Maybe their plans are measured in centuries.

They were working on this at Kodak in the late 90's. At this point it appears to be a vehicle for financial engineers to sell vaporware to the unsuspecting.

I agree. They have links on the site to articles about the tech, and they start in May 2009 and go up to August 2014.

So they haven't been keen on talking to the public for around 10 years.

Finally something that future historians can actually dig up from the ground to learn about us!

Maybe. Where can we buy drives and media?

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