There's a site called "Tedium"? Funny.

Computer output direct to microfilm used to be a thing. This predated laser printers, and was much faster than line printing, since it used a CRT as the output device. This was often used with Kalvar film [1] which responded only to ultraviolet light and was developed by passing it under a heat lamp. No chemical baths were required. It was also easy to copy Kalvar film with a simple machine with rollers and lamps. So lots of boring but useful stuff, such as parts lists, were made and distributed that way. You still see microfiche readers at some parts counters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_film

I didn't realize it took so long for microfilm to catch on in the US.

I knew about Watson Davis was a big US proponent of microfilm in the 1930s:

> "[Microfilm] will supplement other forms of publication and make accessible material of all sorts that can not now be printed because of economic factors. It will make available out-of-print and rare books. It is adapted to the publication of photographs and other illustrations.... In this way the document is perpetually 'in print' but no extensive, space-consuming stocks need be stored, only the document itself and the microfilm negative from which positives are made for distribution."

But that was over a decade after Otlet and Goldschmidt's demonstration.

In the US, I've seen price lists from the mid-1900s. It was cheaper by a factor of two to get a copy from microfilm than from paper.

There was also a question of it printing only on microfilm was a "publication", for purposes of scientific priority and patent priority.

A few other bits.

Depending on the medium you're referencing, many microfiche / microfilms are negatives. That's generally OK for reading text, but it can make interpreting photographs interesting (unless you're an old-school film photographer).

I used to frequent a library which was an archival repository for various arcana. While the main stacks held about 3 million volumes, I realised that one of the fiche archives, at 100 pages per sheet, and fnord knows how many sheets per file-cabinet drawer, rivalled the full collection at least in textual scope in a room which might have measured 4 x 8 meters or so.

I was also aware that the material in the archive (mostly scientific study progress reports) was, in general, nowhere near as interesting as much of the bound volumes. Something about the low cost of a thing facilitating storage of what would otherwise be considered trivia. A lesson I think back to at times today....

Microfiche also greatly democratised pre-digital genealogical research, as it allowed massive amounts of family history data, birth and death notices in newspapers, and so on, to be copied and distributed around the world.

As an historian, I still use it all the time for consulting 17th and 18th century records. There are still large amounts of historical manuscripts that exist on microfiche but are not yet digitized. Looping the film into the machines can be a pain, but I'll miss it when they truly fade into obsolescence. There's something fun about being in a dark room in a library whirring through thousands of pages of ancient manuscripts with an analog machine.

In my experience, it's been the source of some serendipitous discoveries. On microfilm or microfiche, you might catch a glimpse of something really interesting on the nearby pages, which sends you down a completely different track. Just like when you go to a library for one book, then discover two or three really relevant ones on the adjacent shelves.

You don't always get that same experience from some machine learning 'Related Books' algorithm.