Re: Is ProDOS supported in OSX?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

(Hi, Paul!)

>Scientific data never gets obsolete, since you cannot know beforehand
>what data future scientists will request.

Exactly.

>BTW since scientific data more and more are recorded on digital
>media, this poses a long-term problem: will these media still be
>readable in 30 years?  In 80 years?  In 200 years?  And this isn't
>merely a matter about the physical medium being readable, it's
>also a matter about support for logical storage formats: will today's
>file systems be readable in 200 years?  And what about TIFF or
>JPEG image files?

I think it unlikely that we will lose the recipe for such widespread
data representations as JPEG.  If nothing else, such formats are
widely documented in books.  ;-)

Of course, if some new compression technology comes along
that buys another factor of five or more, then someone may be
willing to risk de- and re-compression (generally to be avoided).

And if we're talking about the _really_ long term, say thousands
of years, then I feel safe in saying that the programs necessary
to decode data will be recorded as a brief preface to the data,
in an abstract but machine-interpretable form.  This is in many
ways the ultimate kind of meta-data--an operational description
of the data that follows.  (Or, an abstract object-oriented data
representation, if you will.)

>The older media (glass plates, used for photography) at least have
>one advantage: we can still examine them.  And sometimes there are
>demands to examine glass plates 100+ years old, for scientific
>purposes.

Indeed.  But the worlds collections of glass plates have another
problem, of which I'm sure you are aware--lack of space, caused
by lack of funds for physical preservation.

Increasingly, collections of glass plates are being forced to
relocate, with inevitable breakage, to lower-rent districts. ;-)
Some repositories are taking on the challenge of digitizing
their glass plates so that they are both more accessible to
researchers and less cumbersome to store.

-michael

Check out amazing quality 8-bit Apple sound on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/