Too Kewl

Gotta keep you readers aprised of what's down the road and distract you from the horror of politics and war from time to time. This is one of those times.

How much information can you store on an A4 [8.3 x 11.7 inches] sheet? Well, according to some new technology designed by an Indian engineering student, an extraordinary 256GB.

New "rainbow technology", devised by Sainul Abideen who has just completed an MCA degree in Kerala, data can be encoded into coloured geometric shapes and stored in dense patterns on paper.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in "rainbow format" as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not been revealed.

Using this technology an A4 sheet of paper could store 256GB of data. In comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data. The Rainbow technology is feasible because printed text, readable by the human eye is a very wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data. By printing the data encoded in a denser way much higher capacities can be achieved.

Its here now and will soon be available to the public and the technology isn't terribly expensive. Just think. You could back-up your whole computer on one sheet of bond paper.

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