Dan Lau wrote:
> > I still have boxes of punched cards that are less than 25 years old, and
> > the information is still there. The life span of those punched cards
> > can last another 50 years. But just try to find a card reader that
> > can recover the information today, and you'll understand what I mean.
> > The same can be said for 1/2 inch mag tape, 14 inch disk cartridges,
> > SMD hard drives, MFM hard drives, ESDI hard drives, 8 inch floppies,
> > 5.25 inch floppies, various cartridge tapes, various removable archival
> > storage devices, and so on and so on...
Dan, I agree with your concerns about the impermanece of many forms of
digital storage, and could even add a few of my own. But I think
including modern optical disks in this odd lot is premature. Their mass
acceptance worldwide is a phenomenon that I'd compare to the invention
of the printing press. The loss of digital history would require a
fairly catasrophic interruption in human civiization. And to think that
the marketplace will suddenly decide that a trillion CD's should be
junked doesn't make sense to me. I'm pretty sure that the good stuff
will be copied to the next archive, and so on.
The Sinatra CD I picked up has a track that was never released on the
LP. It spent 40 years in the can on magnetic tape in Capitol's
basement. I think that this music has a better chance of surviving into
the next age on a million or so CD's---and 100 million bootlegs on
formats yet to be--- than it does on the tape.
Preserving history requires good human stewardship, just like it always
has. I think the real problem for the historians will be trying to
preserve what is meaningful from all the digital junk. How will the
archaeologists of the future know whether the disk they are trying to
decipher has Ansel Adams photographs or 2,000 TrueType fonts?
Morgan Sparks
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|