Sainul Abideen, 24, of the Muslim Educational Society Engineering College, says the secret behind his "Rainbow Versatile Disc" (RVD) is that "instead of using zeroes and ones for computing, he used geometric shapes such as circles, squares and triangles for computing which combine with various colours and preserve the data in images".The Register is a bit sceptical and doesn't believe 90 to 450GB will fit on a four-inch square piece of paper.
This "Rainbow Format" data is then read by a scanner. In a demo at his college lab, Abideen demonstrated 432 pages of foolscap content compacted onto a four-inch-square piece of paper. The Arab News correspondent said he also saw a 45-second video clip read from ordinary paper.
The advantages of the RVD are evident, Abideen says. It's cheap (one tenth of the cost of a CD, he claims, while offering 131 times the storage capacity) and planet-friendly (no nasty polycarbonates here). For example, magazines might dispense with the free CD and offer a Rainbow Data tearsheet instead.
Indian student develops paper-based storage system
Posted on Saturday, November 25 2006 @ 21:26 CET by Thomas De MaesschalckAn Indian student has developed a new paper-based storage system that could store 90 to 450GB of data on a single disk:
