The value of paper records.

[Doug Coulter]

I'm self taught to the extent possible, but in real life, we all stand on the shoulders of others, some giants. I have some formal schooling, but tended to "skip out" - I skipped two years of HS to take a scholarship to Uni, then skipped out of there to take a 6 fig job when I figured out I'd already learned what I was going to, there. I was lucky to have been mentored by a series of the very best people in several fields, I don't mean to boast. Then, 6 figs was big money - "hey hey, take the money and run" seemed like a good idea at the time.

I do self-funded fusion research, in my case a coherent colliding recirculating/rebunching beam device, with focus and bunching (that's the RF). It's a bit more complex than your average accelerator thing, as we have multiple charge mass ratios involved (and even different sign charges - but it's a far from neutral plasma with charge-exchange going on as well). We've moved this particular branch of the field ahead around 9 powers of 10 in about 4 years. There are 3 to go till we overcome the losses inherent in making steam and electricity from that. Could be worse, it's a lot less daunting than when we started at 10e-12 away (I do have a partner who finds cool equipment for me for pennies on the buck, we lack for nothing but time and effort).

As far as I can find out, our "Q", which in this field, means "energy out over energy in" is the highest in the entire biz, measured honestly (none of this "we got more fusion energy than was absorbed by the fuel from the laser" baloney that ignores tons of other energy inputs and losses), due to a breakthrough we made awhile back that nearly killed me due to excess exposure to the resulting neutron flux.
My counters all quit counting, and rather than just turn the thing off - not realizing they'd stopped due to pulse pileup when there was simply too much radiation for them to count (in other words, they just all counted one time and got stuck "true" - they didn't stop because it wasn't working, they stopped because it was working too well for their speed of counting limits), fiddled with the thing for 20-30 seconds, and was rad-sick for about 8 weeks, nasty.

I was hoping for a factor of 5, and that usually means I get 2, but actually got around 2800...oops. I found a space-charge taken into account version of the Mathieu equation, it seems, in my gear, and the chances I hit the peak in the resonance by accident are nil. I'm psyched! (link above is to the current main use of that math, not quite what I'm doing here - this math is normally used for cases where no inter-particle Coulomb force need be taken into account.)

Since, I've been working on remote controlling the thing, since even with multiple bottle jacks under the floor, I can barely hold up the shielding I already have, and it's way not-enough. I should be up and running with the new system pretty soon, but am planning to build an extension on a nearby building to put the operator position in - good ol inverse square law and air should do the trick so I don't die just as I succeed. This itself is a little daunting, as it involves tuning stuff that is over 50kv off ground on top of the RF. But only a little.

I suspect this is the wrong thread to discuss that, though...we old farts have to be careful not to thread-jack...the kids might not be able to follow the fast context switching/cognitive dissonance I also have my own sci/tech forums for this one.

On the original topic, though, on further thought, as a candidate for "live forever" information, how about fuse-type burned PROMs of old tech? Or even the old diode matrix thing we used to use, on fiberglass PCBs? Lots of atoms/bit, low chance of any diffusion or reaction type failure (incredibly high activation energy barrier), and in the case of the diodes - even if they fail - or are even fossilized, you still have the pattern. I think it boils down to some function of atoms per bit in the end, and reliable implies large.

 

[billvon]

There are plenty of old desktop computers languishing in university storerooms, government basements and suburban garages. It won't take long to find a diskette drive.

Yes, but . . .

You find that old CP/M machine that can read an 8" floppy. You replace the power supply caps, wiggle the boards and finally it boots. You get a command prompt. Hmm . . . .

So you get on line and find out how to use it. You get a directory. Great, there are the files!

Now what? That CP/M machine won't write it to a CD, or send it to the cloud, or put it on a memory stick. If you are lucky it will have a serial port, and with a little work you'll be able to scrounge a 25 pin to 9 pin adapter and get a serial to USB adapter running on a PC.

Then if you are lucky and they're just text files you can capture them. But if they are any sort of formatted file, you're going to have trouble with the control characters interfering with the serial transfer.

Definitely not easy, and getting harder all the time. Right now you can still get serial to USB adapters. What happens when they are no longer available and/or Windows doesn't support them any more?

 

[Billy T]

I'll not comment more here - soon will look into your physics sub-section, but sounds like to me from the above you must have some circular focusing magnets - big cost and some thing like Larances's cyclotron with high E- field across the gaps.
My Ph. D research at JHU used argon ion plasma and when I graduated I was hired by APL./JHU into a newly forming fusion research group, without even seeking a job.* - US Navy funded for a decade back when all thought it would be easy to put a DT plasma in a magnetic bottle. Navy did not expect our tiny group to solve the problem. APL had many high level people and Navy used them to oversee large contracts. They just wanted us to have "hands-on" high temperature plasma experience as when our group started, Navy was expecting to let the contract for US's first fusion powered aircraft carrier. - six decades ago and not near the goal yet.

* I did go talk to group at NBS that was also working on argon arc plasma (mine was an electrically driven shock tube), They wanted me to work with them, but pay was less (GS11) and I was tired of that ion spectroscopy field and idealistic - wanted to be part of making unlimited, clean energy for mankind.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Heck there's also:
On the CPM machine - can you even read English (assuming that's the language). Does your dump-to machine know ASCII? It goes on and on. Who needs windows? The lowliest arduino or simpler can handle serial, and you can actually, you know, make stuff if you know what you want, anyway.
So, all of this really long term stuff is assumption-bound in the extreme...on a few levels.

Billy, no magnets - it's a lot more subtle and we use the dipole moments and E-fields in the plasma. And if you want to work on energy...well, here I am.