Astral Codex Ten

microfilm

4 min read

microfilm

Article

microfilm is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 30, 2021 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Nobody likes microfilm”; “The most exciting Next Big Thing of the era was microfilm”. It most often appears alongside CIA, 1893, 1970s.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: September 19, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York “World,” odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you’ll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable.
The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.
Microfilm
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
Bush thought we were ripe for a paradigm shift. Some new method of spreading research, connecting it across fields and domains, and making new discoveries in the in-betweens. The most exciting Next Big Thing of the era was microfilm, and so when Bush let his imagination run a little wild,1 he envisioned a machine enabling us to do grand new things with long books shrunk into tidy rolls:
Inline links: 1
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.