engadget: paper-based storage system

College student creates paper-based storage system (no, not that kind)

Posted Nov 25th 2006 10:41AM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Storage

24-year-old Sainul Abideen thinks he's come up with an alternative to CDs and other data storage options that'll allow for greater storage capacities and be cheaper and biodegradable to boot, using a fancy printing technique he's devised to cram loads of data onto a plain old sheet of paper. The trick is to first convert the data into a so-called "Rainbow Format," which is made up of various geometric shapes that can be densely printed onto a sheet of paper; that can then be read by a computer or other device using a Rainbow Card Reader. From the sound of it, the system appears to be somewhat similar to QR Codes and other newfangled bar code-type technologies currently in use in parts of the world other than here, but Abideen's "Rainbow Versitile Disc" can apparently store far more amounts of data than those -- between 90 and 450GB, according to The Arab News. Demonstrations of the technology, however, seem to have only shown much smaller amounts of data being Rainbowfied, including a 45 second video clip and 432 pages of "foolscrap" being stored on a four-inch square piece of paper. Still pretty darn impressive if you ask us, and it sure looks a heckuva lot better hanging on a wall than a CD.

[Via The Register]