Vapourware: The tech that never was

By Nate Lanxon on 11 March 2008, 8:30am

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Rainbow Technology
Rainbow is a paper-based storage technology that uses ordinary paper to store large amounts of data. It was first demonstrated in late 2006 by an Indian chap called Sainul Abideen from the MES College of Engineering, Kerala, and utilises the printing of shapes such as triangles and circles of varying colours on to paper or plastic.

It's a nice idea on paper (bu-dum tsshh), as paper is much cheaper than optical media, and it's also far more environmentally friendly. But Abideen's claims of being able to compress 450 foolscap pages of plain text into a 25mm square of paper are hilariously unimpressive. That amount of text is equal roughly to 1.47MB of data.

He also compressed a 45-second audio clip on to a sheet of A4. Can you imagine the size of the filing cabinet you'd need to comfortably store all The Beatles' recordings at a decent audio quality? We're buggered if we're carting that around when we want to listen to The White Album on the Tube.

Perhaps taken aback by the sheer indifference to his peculiar system, Mr Abideen has claimed his Rainbow format encoding will be able to store 2.7GB of data in into that same 25mm square of paper. This is revolutionary! The Rainbow encoder must utilise an exceptionally efficient lossless technique, the likes of which would be so ground-breaking it would overturn the entire storage industry. The only problem is, Abideen isn't talking about how it works, and neither has he demonstrated this outstanding claim.

Whatever encoding technique is being used prior to printing, it's being handled by a computer, so there should be no reason why the subsequently compressed data can't be stored on conventional media, such as a DVD or even a Web server, eliminating the need to mess around with printers, scanners, precise colour and shape recognition and, of course, dust. But that's just our opinion, for what it's worth.

As a matter of fact...
While Abideen works on using the fragile medium of paper to store humungous chunks of data, US inventor Michael Thomas is working on a type of 3.5-inch drive capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data -- that's about 1,258,000 gigabytes of data in the space of a normal hard drive bay.

So which would you back: paper or three-dimensional atomic holographic optical data storage nanotechnology?