
The Strange History of Microfilm - benbreen
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-strange-history-of-microfilm-which-will-be-with-us-for-centuries
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Animats
There's a site called "Tedium"? Funny.

Computer output direct to microfilm used to be a thing. This predated laser
printers, and was much faster than line printing, since it used a CRT as the
output device. This was often used with Kalvar film [1] which responded only
to ultraviolet light and was developed by passing it under a heat lamp. No
chemical baths were required. It was also easy to copy Kalvar film with a
simple machine with rollers and lamps. So lots of boring but useful stuff,
such as parts lists, were made and distributed that way. You still see
microfiche readers at some parts counters.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_film)

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dalke
I didn't realize it took so long for microfilm to catch on in the US.

I knew about Watson Davis was a big US proponent of microfilm in the 1930s:

> "[Microfilm] will supplement other forms of publication and make accessible
> material of all sorts that can not now be printed because of economic
> factors. It will make available out-of-print and rare books. It is adapted
> to the publication of photographs and other illustrations.... In this way
> the document is perpetually 'in print' but no extensive, space-consuming
> stocks need be stored, only the document itself and the microfilm negative
> from which positives are made for distribution."

But that was over a decade after Otlet and Goldschmidt's demonstration.

In the US, I've seen price lists from the mid-1900s. It was cheaper by a
factor of two to get a copy from microfilm than from paper.

There was also a question of it printing only on microfilm was a
"publication", for purposes of scientific priority and patent priority.

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dredmorbius
A few other bits.

Depending on the medium you're referencing, many microfiche / microfilms are
_negatives_. That's generally OK for reading text, but it can make
interpreting photographs interesting (unless you're an old-school film
photographer).

I used to frequent a library which was an archival repository for various
arcana. While the main stacks held about 3 million volumes, I realised that
one of the fiche archives, at 100 pages per sheet, and fnord knows how many
sheets per file-cabinet drawer, rivalled the full collection _at least in
textual scope_ in a room which might have measured 4 x 8 meters or so.

I was also aware that the material in the archive (mostly scientific study
progress reports) was, in general, nowhere near as interesting as much of the
bound volumes. Something about the low cost of a thing facilitating storage of
what would otherwise be considered trivia. A lesson I think back to at times
today....

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flashman
Microfiche also greatly democratised pre-digital genealogical research, as it
allowed massive amounts of family history data, birth and death notices in
newspapers, and so on, to be copied and distributed around the world.

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benbreen
As an historian, I still use it all the time for consulting 17th and 18th
century records. There are still large amounts of historical manuscripts that
exist on microfiche but are not yet digitized. Looping the film into the
machines can be a pain, but I'll miss it when they truly fade into
obsolescence. There's something fun about being in a dark room in a library
whirring through thousands of pages of ancient manuscripts with an analog
machine.

~~~
flashman
In my experience, it's been the source of some serendipitous discoveries. On
microfilm or microfiche, you might catch a glimpse of something really
interesting on the nearby pages, which sends you down a completely different
track. Just like when you go to a library for one book, then discover two or
three really relevant ones on the adjacent shelves.

You don't always get that same experience from some machine learning 'Related
Books' algorithm.

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Aelinsaar
I'm not sure that the conclusion in this article is correct. For now it is,
but lets say that we end up using nitrogen vacancies in crystals to store
information at some point before these future historians get started? That's
just one example of tech that's being developed, and would be extremely
durable. By no means is it the only one.

