>What will the photo industry do to take care of old image
>files in 5 years' time? Ten years' time? Forty years' time?
>Will the media and the software still exist that are needed
>to access them? The speed of change in the computer industry
>has me doubt it. When did you last see an 8-inch floppy disk
>- (if ever). They were in use in my employer's office 10 years
>ago for word-processing.. Now you try and find a machine to
>read them. What about punched cards for computer input? I
>last used them 20 years ago. Could you find a card-reader
>now?
Hmmm. I last saw an 8-inch drive a couple of years ago when I
needed some data off an 8-inch floppy and took it to a data
conversion shop. No problem finding data conversion services,
just looked in the yellow pages. You can still find places that
will do punchcards and punched paper tape, too.
Of course, I wouldn't have had that problem if it had been my own
8" floppy, since I copied all of them onto backup tapes when I
knew my regular access to an 8" drive was going away. I don't
have anything important left on 5.25" or 3.5" floppies these
days, already copied them onto CD. You can fit a ton of floppies
on one CD, so even if floppies never go away, it's a lot more
convenient to have all the stuff on CD. Plus you can make copies
of the CDs for off-site backup.
When at last today's CD format becomes obsolete, I'm sure I'll be
able to fit quite a stack of CDs on whatever medium replaces
them.
These days, anyone who wants their digital archives preserved
just has to throw a bit of money at the problem. There are
commercial providers who will make media upgrades invisible to
the customer. At a small scale, I don't even know when phred.org
gets bigger disks or even gets moved onto a whole new machine.
The photos on my web page come up just the same as ever, no
effort on my part at all.
--
josh@xxxxxxxxx is Joshua Putnam
http://www.phred.org/~josh/
Build your own bicycle frames. See
http://www.phred.org/~josh/build/build.html
< 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 >
|