From Che Sent Fri, Mar 5th 1999, 20:58
From Che Sent Fri, Mar 5th 1999, 20:58
Chaircrusher wrote: >>The Dead Sea Scrolls were written on homemade paper 2k years ago, and >>they're still readable for the most part. One can only hope that 'modern' >>digital media will eventually reach that standard of usability in one tenth >>that amount of time. The only reason the DSS survived is that they happened to be stored in a near-perfect environment. Even so, their discovery by herders meant that many pieces were lost because they flaked off, or were used for kindling, or toilet paper, or whatever. It also required rather sophisticated image-enhancement software to make out many of the characters. Read a translation and you'll find lots of brackets [... sons of light?] indicating missing or indecipherable sections with guesswork on the content. Imagine dropouts in your music every few seconds - very annoying. (FWIW I've read enough on the subject that I was able to point out numerous mistakes in the last History Channel special on the DSS that I saw). There are 3 basic problems with long-term survival of any medium - availability, durability, and readability. How many were made, how long will they last, and will someone be able to understand it when they find it? Readability is often related to durability and availability - the more examples that survive increase the chances that someone will be able to figure out the pattern, if the keys to reading the pattern are lost. Minoan Linear B script was decoded, Linear A wasn't, in part because there are fewer examples of Linear A to work with. For an interesting examination of media longevity, see this month's WIRED magazine for an article on the slowly dieing (but not a slowly as you'd think) Hollerith punchcard. It has a great story about some old guy w/ a garage full of symphony samples from the 50's stored on punchcards who decided it was time to convert to a newer medium. >Suppose 10 years ago I'd written the great american novel on my Commodore >Vic 20 and saved it on a cassette? What chance will someone in 20 years >have of decoding that? CD is a very common medium, much much more common than the VIC20 cassette. And properly manufactured & stored, it's very durable. I think that backwards compatability with it will be required in any laser-based playback device for another 20 years. Which means CDs will be readable for a lot longer. >The problem I have with mp3 (and I use 'em, love 'em trade 'em etc) is the >same problem I have with all digital storage -- once the decoding technology >goes obsolete and people stop maintaining the decoders, you have media with >no way to extract the content! MP3s are a little more problematic, but storing them on an ISO format CDR should mean they're readable for at least 100 years. Then the question is, will anyone be able to decode it? If you've looked at the action in emulation software, chances are in 20 years you'll be able to run Win95 or MacOs 8.5 programs in emulation (at 100x today's speed :), and you'll be able to find an MP3 decoder in a web archive. In fact, I think the trends of emulation & archiving bode well for long-term preservation. (Who'da thunk you could execute the EPROMs from an Asteroids videogame after 20+ years?) Even so, you might be required to do some transfer work on your own every 10-20 years. CD -> DVD Audio-> Crystal HoloCube or whatever comes next. At least digital media make for lossless, fairly pain-free transfers. I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of DVD-RAM so that I can transfer Beta, VHS, and 8MM videocassettes to digital (and some of these contain transfers from 8MM film - the process has already begun). Looking longer term, assuming civilization hangs together (it won't be taken out by Y2K), I think the billions of audio CDs made will insure that preservationists will be able to read them in 200 years. CDROMs, especially ISO format, should also be readable, though ASCII text files should be a lot more usable than Excel 98 format files. I'm not losing any sleep over it. Che There's nothing that'll make me reach for the MUTE button faster than a Philips commercial...except Alannis Morrisette.