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Storing Data for Centuries: Page 2 of 4

Bishop won't talk about other customers or who has made use of the HD-Rosetta archival preservation technology. But the Rosetta Project's blog post says an early prototype was launched into space in 2004 by the European Space Agency. Stashed away on the Rosetta Space Probe is a nickel disk with thousands of pages of language translations. The probe is slated to land on a comet sometime in 2014.

Religious and spiritual organizations have shown a lot of interest in the technology. "Many of these groups are very interested in preserving their data," Bishop says. And it can be done in a number of ways. "We put the Bible on a little cross, a quarter inch square. It is nearly 1,500 pages and you can see it very clearly under 200-power microscope. We can even do nano-jewelry.

"Eventually, I think this technology will end up in the county seat and the court house and in government agencies like the

FDA for keeping important records for the long term," he says. "That's why it was developed at Los Alamos."

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) developed the micro-etching approach as it was exploring ways to preserve data so it could withstand a nuclear attack or other man-made or natural disasters. The labs conducted extensive durability tests on the disks. Norsam licenses the technology from the labs.

For Bishop, the technology solves problems he witnessed throughout his early years. When he was in high school, he worked at the Library of Congress. "They had books that were disintegrating because of the acid in the paper," he says. In his 20s, he worked at a microfilm company and later got into book binding. "My background is archival preservation. So when I found this at Los Alamos I was excited," he says. "I call it permafilm [because] it is a much more permanent form of microfilm."