Here's an article about the lil Chinese vinyl recorder toy I mentioned:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90810302/this-vinyl-recorder-is-the-cure-for-the-gluttonous-era-of-streaming-music
quotingMy favorite thing about them isn't relatable to most people, it's mainly not an audiophile thing about the sound or anything like that. I did a deep dive on all the data storage media's longevity and vinyl has by far the best shelf life. It could be really useful these days.
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The downsides in the past were: it's hard to write data to a vinyl record, and it can be worn out more easily by reading from it instead of sitting on a shelf.
However, today there are Chinese toys that can write (horribly) to vinyl records. And there's expensive equipment that can use lasers to read vinyl like a CD without a damaging needle. With a bit of work, vinyl can come back as a valuable backup storage medium for the world.
It's not a coincidence that things developed this way. There's an inherent conflict between something's read/write durability and its shelf life - in principle, the easier it is to record data to something, the easier it is for environmental factors to rewrite that data at random, corrupting/deleting it. So a CD that claims to last a thousand years struggles to do so because it's hard to make it so the data can be written by a tiny weak laser, and can't be overwritten by years of slight temperature changes or anything like that. Cassette tapes likewise struggle with being unable to escape the world's magnetic field.
Every storage medium is a developing technology that continues being improved after its initial release, and vinyl record kept advancing after being "replaced" to where now it might have something to offer again.
Fuck man, digit would probably not hate this post. She might like how I used math words or something. I hope she's fine