On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 02:13:07PM -0400, [email protected] wrote: > > Mention was made that a major factor might be that in the future there > would be no hardware or software capable of reading the drives. I disagree > as there are still available machines that can play some of the oldest > mechanical media in existence that I can think of in modern times, > cylindrical music records. While they might be in museums, as data storage > advances, worthwhile data tends to be carried forward too to newer media.
Oh, how I wish that were true. Unfortunately, it's a continual and ubiquitous problem in the world of data - and not just computers. NASA has tons of data from the early days of spaceflight... and no idea how to read it, since the hardware to read it no longer exists. Moreover, no one knows the scheme used to encode the data. Some small part of it - e.g., the Lunar Orbiter data - has been recovered, mostly due to luck and one woman's persistence: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/22/nation/na-lunar22 The BBC was recently involved in a huge scandal: huge amounts of public money went into creating a complete history of the British Isles with lots of video content... all of which was recorded on a videodisc format that no longer exists. The above are just two examples of a continual problem. I know people who bought a library of movies on Betamax tapes (ooops!); I myself used to own a SuperDisk floppy drive. The problem, of course, is that you can't predict which format will survive the test of time and public opinion. On a larger scale, it's a problem that archivists continually face. A former girlfriend of mine, an archivist with a PhD in library science, told me that the best long-term storage we humans have is punched mylar tape, with a projected life of 20,000 years. Of course, long before that time, the encoding will be lost... -- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET * _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
