Anybody Remember Microfish?

[Pillz]

Ok, I was helping my uncle clean out his garage the other day, and I saw this odd looking device.
 
He told me it was called Microfish... like an old projector. It uses these thick cards with many cells on them, and you insert the card into a reader, and it blows up the images on the screen that were in each cell in the card. You use a joy stick to move around between rows and columns of the cells. He said it was easier than having a bunch of manuals.
 
Instead of reading and bitchin' , try microfishin'!
 
way cool...

[PankoClock]

may i buy from your uncle?

[heineken]

Or you can just use a computer, which renders television, radio, slide projectors, typewriters, record and cassette players, telegrams and social lives utterly useless!

It is truly a remarkable contraption.

[Pillz]

Or you can just use a computer, which renders television, radio, slide projectors, typewriters, record and cassette players, telegrams and social lives utterly useless!
 
It is truly a remarkable contraption.

True, computers are a marvel of the last 30 years... but back in the day, Microfish was important.
 
See, I have a thing for old technology, I even still use my old BETA tape player because it records in better quality than VHS. It's too bad that beta tapes aren't sold anymore, however, finding a stash of cartoons from my childhood was awesome.
 
Ducktales, Inspector Gadget, Super Mario Bros Super Show, Legend of Zelda
 
Good stuff, good times.

[joliet_jane]

Anybody Remember Microfish?

Fish? Is microfiche really that unknown these days?

Here's a picture I took some time ago in the library where I work to show students what the hell a microfiche is:



We've got the microfilm too, of course:



That was pretty high-capacity storage back then.

Or you can just use a computer, which renders television, radio, slide projectors, typewriters, record and cassette players, telegrams and social lives utterly useless!

Computers aren't forever. Not yet, anyway. These little plastic sheets are pretty durable. They are more appropriate for long-term preservation than digital means considering the poor track record for digital preservation (although this is changing, I hope).

In the meantime, some libraries that can afford them can get computer microfilm/fiche readers that can create PDFs and save or email them. My library can't afford one.

Instead of reading and bitchin' , try microfishin'!
 
way cool...

It is way cool, damn it.

[RomanClock]

Computers aren't forever. Not yet, anyway. These little plastic sheets are pretty durable. They are more appropriate for long-term preservation than digital means considering the poor track record for digital preservation (although this is changing, I hope).

Advantage of digital is that it can be duplicated and edited more easily.

[joliet_jane]

Advantage of digital is that it can be duplicated and edited more easily.

Yeah, you'd think it would be that simple, but no. I took a 3-credit class on digital preservation, because I thought they'd teach me how to do it. That's not what I got at all. All I got was a lot of theories about how it could be done.

Preservation is meant for "forever" and digital objects haven't been good at "forever." Digital preservation is more than preserving the 1s and 0s. There are so many things that can go wrong and have gone wrong. If you have old media (floppy?) with no drive to read it, those bits are useless. If you don't have the right software, those bits are useless. If the machines both of those run on aren't preserved or emulated, those bits are useless. (+ electricity) Even NASA managed to fuck up and lose data from the Viking I mission to Mars.

Migrating data can be a bitch sometimes too. That's especially true of cell phones that won't let you do shit with anything on your phone, like your contact lists or media. DRM often takes away the best advantages of digital objects, because you aren't allowed to migrate the data. I have one rare PS2 game and one rare PS1 game. I can't copy them to new discs to protect them.

Open-source software and better standards for hardware have improved things. Proprietary formats are dangerous for preservation because if a company kills a format off or goes bankrupt, the support for the format is gone. I got bit in the ass by AOL's ".ART" image format many years ago. I somehow found a converter to make them JPEGs, but if I hadn't I would've lost those pictures.

It wouldn't be hard to backwards engineer a michrofiche machine; even a microscope would do the job. Paper rots, but all you need is light and language to use one. That's as close to forever as we can get. However, born-digital objects can't be preserved by non-digital means. So that's the problem we have.

I actually made a flash presentation for our library's web site about Digital Preservation but I don't want anyone to see it because it's not very good.