SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored “digital characters” to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
[...] Rather than using the traditional dots and dashes as commonly used in these technologies, the Purdue innovators encode information in the angular position of tiny antennas, allowing them to store more data per unit area.
"The storage capacity greatly increases because it is only defined by the resolution of the sensor by which you can determine the angular positions of antennas," said Alexander Kildishev, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "We map the antenna angles into colors, and the colors are decoded."
[...]This new development not only allows for more information to be stored but also increases the readout rate.
"You can put four sensors nearby, and each sensor would read its own polarization of light," Kildishev said. "This helps increase the speed of readout of information compared to the use of a single sensor with dots and dashes."
Future applications for this technology include security tagging and cryptography. To continue developing these capabilities, the team is looking to partner with interested parties in the industry.
Journal Reference:
Maowen Song, Di Wang, Zhaxylyk A. Kudyshev, et al. Enabling Optical Steganography, Data Storage, and Encryption with Plasmonic Colors, Laser & Photonics Reviews (DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202000343)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2021, @11:45AM (1 child)
I like my tape recorder.
you plug in the microphone, speak into it, and the magnetic tape doesn't know how to count, but still you can listen to yourself afterwards.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday February 04 2021, @04:11PM
And on the same analogue tape, with proper D-A encoding, I could encode more than the same data in an MP3-like format with a pure binary encoding.
Hell, there used to be a thing called VideoBacker which, on an ordinary three hour VHS tape in an ordinary tape record could store 1Gb+ of data as screen images (basically like lots of rapid colour QR codes).
If you could write to and read from the tape directly, you could easily store terabytes on there (which is exactly how backup tapes work).