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Re: A2 Trade/Swap???? site discovered - What are your thoughts on such a site?
In article <395A428C.3B9DABC9@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
>
>> Most of our
>> books, papers, etc are printed in acid based paper, which will
>> disintegrate after several centuries.
>
> Paul, I wish you were right on this one, but sad to say, depending on the
> quality of the paper, the disintegration can happen in decades, not
> centuries.
True....
> I have a commentary by an English Baptist that was printed in the late 1890s,
> it's in worst shape, even though it had never been used, than a journal by
> the first American bishop of the Methodist church that had been printed
> in the 1790s.
Well, in the 1890'~s, acid paper had started to be used, right?
>> Books up until about 1880 weren't printed on such paper and will therefore
>> last much longer.
>
> When buying a book today, high quality hard bounds will again be printed
> on acid free paper. Sad to say that isn't true of most paperbacks.
True -- the problem of acid paper has received attention, and acid free
paper is once again being used, at least for high-quality books.
So future archaeologists may then conclude that book printing ceased
around 1880, but was again resumed around 2000....
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Anyway, I merely wanted to point out that storing data such that
it remains accessible for a very long time is problematic. NASA
had a project some 5-10 years ago of trnasferring its old spacecraft
data from obsolete tape formats to CD-ROM's. Their #1 problem was
finding equipment which was able to read those obsolete tapes -- but
once they succeeded in doing that, problem #2 popper up: these tapes
would quite often break when played back....
Data storage over long periods of time indeed has its problems. But
I don't think CD's spontaneously disintegrating will be the main
problpem. A more severe problem will probably be CD-ROM's becoming
an obsolete data storeage medium, i.e. in 10-15 years or so it may
become difficult to find a CD-ROM reader.
--
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Paul Schlyter, Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40, S-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN
e-mail: pausch at saaf dot se or paul.schlyter at ausys dot se
WWW: http://hotel04.ausys.se/pausch http://welcome.to/pausch