If it’s not human readable, it is much more likely to be destroyed or misinterpreted as simple art. Microfiche and foil are more difficult to identify and read by other cultures.
Ah, memories. I finally had to replace my 4s because it took forever to print pdf files. But the quality was outstanding.
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The trick with readable-size text getting progressively smaller can be applied here.
That could work.
You’re assuming a blank slate - no information or lore of the previous civilization exists. Which didn’t happen for Roman, Greek, Incan, Mayan civilizations or most of the lesser ones.
But even then, once the next civilization reaches a 1990s level of technology, it shouldn’t be a problem. By then they’ll have examined a few optical discs with microscopes and noticed apparent data. And they’ll be using optical media regardless.
Civilization MK II wouldn’t be starting from scratch. In the same way that we have mountains of old Roman pottery, they’ll have mountains of old Civ1 devices. Rarely working of course. But it’ll be enough to teach them basic principles for many things and give them one hell of a head start in building their own. And unlike archeology, there will be a hell of a lot of money to be made recovering and understanding old technology.
But again, losing everything is unlikely. If civilization just collapses for a few generations, there will be plenty of working old optical drives and generators around.
“PC” is the abbreviation for “paper cassette.” It’s telling you to load it with letter-sized paper.
When the paper cassette with legal paper is empty, it’ll say “PC LOAD LEGAL.”
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Either you haven’t seen “Office Space”, or your sense of humor is incredibly dry. (Mine’s pretty dry, but I’m still banking on the former.)
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Weird. I’ve never had that problem with either HP Laser 4 on parallel ports. Do you mean 4s as in "more than one LaserJet 4’, or as in the LaserJet 4Si? (The 4Si, 4L and 4P were different, and not as reliable as the 4+.) (And then there’s the 4M/4M+, the Mac versions where the interfacing would be different.)
I haven’t seen it. Between programming and kids, I missed a couple decades of TV.
It’s a movie from 1999, that the quote was from.
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What Tropo said.
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I’m thinking @RogerStrong 's humor is dry. I mean, that’s the funniest thing about the movie; a really smart engineer gets his decimals wrong and can’t figure out “PC load letter.” Brilliant.
And why didn’t it get changed to ‘out of paper’ or ‘I need paper to print on!’ on week two of UAT?
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You didn’t like Office Space?
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I could swear it was a 4m, but I used it with a pc and then three non-Mac laptops. Maybe it was a 4L and I’m thing of the toner cartridge labeling? Didn’t it come 4L/4M, or something like that? Anyway, it still worked well for, like, 18 years. It was a workhorse.
Now I’m wondering if it was a 5 series (5m)? I bought it in 1995 (when I started a grad program) I’ll look for the cds and then I’ll let you know.
Well, I’m wrong about that one. 
No, I loved it! I just like the more subtle commentary Judge was making since, I believe, he was an engineer or programmer before hitting it big.
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Right on.
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I think that I can answer your question just by selective quoting: [quote=“William_Holz, post:53, topic:76021”]
UAT?
[/quote]
The Heroic Age printers were from the days when HP was an engineering company with a strong engineering culture; and this was back when even a mediocre laser unit was a nontrivial chunk of cash, so I’d strongly suspect that nobody even seriously considered bothering with a ‘bounce it off random users’ step. (There’s also probably internal logic being partially exposed here: the paper cassette is only one possible paper source, and can accept a variety of paper sizes, so “Out of paper” would be considered an unhelpful error message, while “Location Needing attention” + “Action Needed” + “Type of part to perform necessary action with” tells you unambiguously where the problem is, what you should do about it, and how. Particularly on the larger printers and copier-monster-things, one does not simply 'run out of paper, there may be five or six paper trays storing various sizes, particular forms, etc. plus manual feed paths. That doesn’t mean that the product with only one tray should get the complex error messages; but it’d be very tempting for engineering to treat it as a trivial special case of their product line and spend more time working on the complex devices).
(Apropos of the Laserjet LCD displays, though… The laserjets support user-specified text on those displays through PJL commands and nobody ever locks down some of the more obscure services running on jetdirect cards. Back in school we had our lab printer alternating between “Printer is full of secrets” and “Your document is my prisoner”. Hapless IT guy never figured out what happened, or even the mechanism by which it was done. Fun times. Better times, honestly. Much better times than I’ve had in a long time. It’s starting to feel like it all happened to somebody else, a lifetime ago.
Sorry. Probable TMI.)
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Assuming that physical standards can be discovered from ruined equipment, it is the software and encryption of the data (in the case of DVDs etc) that would most likely be lost forever. How long is a PROM readable? How easy is it to figure out how to read a PROM?
The use of the Antikythera is still something of a mystery to us and it come from a culture that we have some informational continuity with. It’s also a physical device that should be more self evident then any IC board or chip.
I suppose you could try to store data in long term optical discs and then build a library of how to access those discs. but the optical disc presupposes: Digital computers, lasers, electricity, programming languages down to the binary, file systems for computers, computer displays, Integrated Circuits and processors and last but not least language. Each of those variables would have to be developed in a way that is compatible with how we did it. If there is a discontinuity in culture where humanity loses computing as we know it, reverse engineering optical discs would take much more development.
A primer that uses mathematical language to teach scholars how to read the data in human readable media is much simpler and can kickstart the next civilization much earlier.
