(Copyright (c) 2007 Daniel B. Botkin)

Everybody I know who uses a computer in their work has a problem with saving
information.  The technical term is archiving.  And I think I’ve found the perfect solution, which I’ll tell you about here.  But first, how did I come up with this idea anyway?

A few years ago I decided to go to a paperless office.  Why have all those files and piles of paper lying around?  It was time to get modern and go to the ultimate in neat and permanent storage of information.  So I bought an expensive flatbed scanner and some software called OCR, for optical character recognition.  My accountant had suggested it.  Think how much money I could save on the storage units I rented for all my papers.  He said  the scanner and the payment for a company to do additional scanning (and clean up my office too) could be a business write-off.

But I soon discovered that the whole idea wasn’t worth the paper it was written
on.  OCR software couldn’t OCR, at least not accurately.  Then the information got out
that the latest in non-paper storage, CD-ROMs, weren’t permanent either. In fact,
nobody was quite sure how long they lasted  — maybe only a decade.  The worst event
was trying to read some scientific data accumulated in the late 1980s —- the old, old
days, as my scientific colleagues told me.  This was after one of my colleagues at a
recent scientific meeting referred to “that old paper you wrote a long time ago.”  Going
back to my publication list, I discovered it was first published in 2000. 

My 1980s data were stored on the best, most advanced backup system in
existence for personal computers at that time –  Colorado Systems tape backups.  But
each new version of that company’s storage devices was not backward compatible.
While the storage capacities got larger and larger, the new machines could not read
what the old tapes contained.  Thinking that my data were safe on a backup tape, I had
carefully stored it in one of the rented storage units.  Then around 1995, a new
graduate student wanted to use those data.  “Sure,” I said, “We’ve got it backed up
here.”  But nobody could find a tape system of that era.  The data sat on tape that
nothing could read.

I was saved in the end because one of my former employees had bought an old
computer from my company (we would have thrown it out otherwise) and used it for a
few years at home.  I called him, and he said that old machine, ca. 1985, had the
proper tape reader built in, but he had sold it to a friend.  He called the friend, and it
turned out the computer was still in use, old as it was, and the friend had never
bothered to take out the antique tape drive.  So we rushed our tape to the friend’s
house and copied the data onto the latest backup system, a ZIP drive  Then the tape
joined a six-foot-tall file cabinet full of IBM cards in one of my storage units, which await
a time when somebody can find a card reader, and contain data too good to throw out.

Archiving scientific and personal data isn’t the only storage problem our
civilization faces.  As the newest technology and ways of thinking arrive, we do not
seem to have room for the old.  Forestry schools used to have specialists in wood
technology who had collections of hardwoods from all over the world —  beautiful-yard
long and several inch wide strips of wood of gloriously different colors and patterns —
almost-black walnut; rich brown mahoganies; speckled woods few  could identify
anymore.  But this passed out of fashion several decades ago.  

Yale University once had a major collection of these woods and a professor who
could actually name them.  But when he retired, Yale decided wood technology wasn’t
with it enough anymore and threw out the collection.  Those of us on the faculty and
graduate students at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies knew the
exact morning when the collection was going to appear at a university dumpster.  Like
African vultures circling a carcass, about twenty of us arrived at dawn and hovered
around the garbage, waiting.  When the truck arrived and poured the wood samples
out, we went into a feeding frenzy, all of us grabbing whatever we could.  During the
next year, we had an informal contest of who could make the most beautiful piece of
furniture from the hardwood strips, few of which we could identify.

Then there are the old phonograph records and early audio wire and tape drives.
You can get most of these played at the Library of Congress, but the guy who knows
how to make and maintain the players is about to retire.  What then? 

Many kinds of heritages of civilization are apparently not “pop” enough for even
our scholarly institutions to want to save.  It’s like old furniture. A sixty-million-year-old
dinosaur seems to be something everybody wants, but my collection of letters has a
small market.

That we were truly confronting an archive crisis came home to me when I met a
man involved with creating a warning sign that would last 10,000 years and be placed at
a dump for nuclear wastes.  He had reviewed the longest-existing human artifacts and
found that there were two kinds: graffiti, mainly people’s names; and large stone
objects, like Stonehenge, whose real purpose we still do not fully understand.  Aha.  A
Stone-jet printer is the answer to my archival problems I realized.

Faced with the potential demise of civilization, I began work, surrounded by piles
of old newspapers, constructing a stone-jet printer.  The early versions have been a
little crude.  The first used a small pneumatic hammer that chipped at thin sheets of
flagstone that could be loaded into the stone tray, fifty sheets at a time.  A very large
vacuum system lifted the stones one by one and fed them into the printer’s flatbed,
where the hammer chipped away.  But the chips kept clogging up the stone feeder.
Next I tried an automatic drill, which produced a fine dust that lubricated the stone
sheets, but it got into the air and made me sneeze.  Then I went to a mortuary and
learned that the latest  technology for gravestones was a laser writer.  Another aha. 

My latest printer uses the same vacuum feed system for thin sheets of flagstone,
but the messages are vaporized into the sheet by a high-energy laser.  No mess.  While
my patent application is in the works, I am considering where to archive  the sheets,
which at this time are piling up rapidly all over the house and in the backyard.  The
flagstone is also good for building, so my plan is to make tombs out of them.  Each
person buying a stone-jet printer could also order a burial site and be spend eternity
surrounded by and protected by his favorite sets of data, old love letters and other
correspondence.  My collection of short essays, each a thousand words long, is serving
well as a wall between my house and my horse pasture.  My next plan is a small
pyramid behind the garage. 

Anybody interested in purchasing a stone-jet printer, can contact me at my web
site.   While you at it, you might want to purchase a useful attachment, a small crane to lift the stones.¼/p>