How many GB would one file cabinet hold?

Cromewell said:

What if you used a smaller text size and a condensed font?

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apj101 said:

Exactly, and why are we assuming we have to use binary? if we are talking about text we could convert the binary into any textual represention, we could use tertiary etc.
or why not just use the actual number that the binary represent? so i can squeeze binary 11111111 into 255, increasing capacity by 266%.
Then if we bring on board alpha numeric letters we can go crazy with the size
so by adding one letter to make an 8 bit block into a 9 bit, so 11111111[x] were [x] can be any letter. I cant even do the math but that gives a massive increase in space alone (like 100x)

Heck why even bother with the first 8 bits in binary, and why bother limiting to 24 alpha chars, there are well over a hundred possible chars in thousands of possible fonts, plus the underline, subscript, strike out, double strick out, italics (and combinations thereof). AND THEN we can start using different colours for each character of which there are thousands of colours. There must be over a 10,000,000 possible district characters that could occupy one character space on a sheet off paper. and then we could start looking a combinations of these!!. In short you could probably compact an entire song into about 1 line (maybe just a few chars) under this system, albeit the system would be complex.

Just because computers can only read in binary doesn't mean the human eye can. You'd just have to run a converter across it (much like we do when we convert a programming language into (ultimately binary)

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PohTayToez said:

Well of course there are infinite ways in which you could store more information... you could use colored microscopic dots, as small as you could possibly make them, with each color representing a different value, and be able to store an astronomical amount of information on each sheet of paper...

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