Hitachi presents a storage medium that should last forever (opens in new tab)

That link won't work without a Google referrer.

If you look starting 6 days ago, this story has been submitted 5 previous times.

The data has all been recovered: There's a full implementation of the Domesday Book project on a large touch-surface table at the National Museum of Computing ( http://www.tnmoc.org/ ) at Bletchley Park, as well as a couple of the original readers.

Here's an article about the new hardware: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/news-releases/bbc-domesday-touchta...

I saw it in action on a work trip to TNMOC earlier this year: it's quite nifty.

The second part of your comment is interesting. Can electronics be designed in a way so that it has a very long life?

The idea - hard-code information to silicon and preserve it. e.g. Chips on PCBs that are completely encased in substrate. Provide fused power prongs and a serial port interface to this. Future systems can integrate to this to consume the data.

CD/DVD/BlueRays do wear out, specially if they are from cheap brands.

The coating layer just vanishes, leaving you with an unreadable piece of plastic.

You could potentially store them inside/along with a virtual machine image which would be capable of rendering them, and then document the crap out of the VM (which would require as few, and as simple, external interfaces as possible), such that it could be easily re-created/ported to future OSes.

I think quite a few places where continuity over decade timescales (especially in the embedded world) are storing VM images with the exact versions of various parts of the toolchain they use, to ensure compatibility.

And of course, there's plenty of precedent with things like the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator[1], as well as things like VMWare, Bochs, QEMU, etc.

I think I've come across old DOS games being re-released wrapped with dosbox or something similar as a compat layer for modern OSes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29

It's for small values of "forever".

The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.

One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.

Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.

Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"

AC said, "Hang on, I have the answer inscribed on a Hitachi glass tablet somewhere."

-- Isaac Asimov, "The Last Tablet"

Nothing last forever... except hyperbole.

The reflective layer is still made of metal and the two layers are glued together. You have to take the maker's words on how durable those actually are.

And much more useful than Hitachis. What is HItachi's storage capacity/density? Read rate? Any useful information at all? Vaporware.

Like pyrex?

Edit: Like borosilicate glass?

If it's actual visual dots on the glass, it sounds like you'd just need to figure out how to get a good enough photograph of the thing to see the dots in and spend an afternoon whipping up an image processing script in Python to convert the dots to binary code. This sounds a lot simpler than whatever would be involved in setting up the apparatus to read bits of volatile magnetic media where you'd have to interact more closely with the media, be more mindful of not accidentally destroying the stored data and rely on much less intuitive physics than looking at a thing through a microscope for the recovery process.

CD:s are just punch cards made on aluminium.

I can imagine that one could melt the surface a bit and then rewrite it.