An Australian company, Hudson-Allen Pty Ltd of Box Hill, Victoria has turned to the mature – and threatened – technology of microfiche to create a new low-cost data storage medium. According to Microbytes Daily, the proprietary technique enables each standard microfiche frame to store up to 5Mb of data. Apart from the low cost and the high storage capacity on a small sheet of film, the technique enables the data to be endlessly and quickly duplicated using standard fiche reprographic methods, such as diazo. The digitally recorded fiche is encoded using a graphics or dot-matix computer output microfilm recorder, and are read by the proprietary Hudson Card Reader, which attaches to MS DOS and Apple Macintosh computers via an RS-232 or SCSI interface. Average access time for a particular piece of data is half a second and the data transfer rate is 1Kbyte per second.
