Re: PC or Mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3c5bf89e_1@news3.prserv.net>,
Tom Zuchowski <tzuchow@attglobal.net> wrote:
 
> "Will Strutts" <wrstrutts1@home.com> wrote in message
> news:Jlr58.15321$Zc.5649982@news2.rdc1.mi.home.com...
>>
>> The CD didn't appear here until around 1983/4 but didn't become prevalent
>> until the late 80's. In the early 90's, record albumns disappeared
>> altogether.  I recall the shock one day going into a record store and not
>> finding anything other than CD's and cassette tapes. This must have been
>> around 1991/2.  The same situation is happening with Cassettes. They are
>> now a rarity and blank cassettes are difficult to find. It is very
>> difficult too to find a cassette deck for your stereo and I still have
>> a couple boxes of them that I can't play because I use CD's in both
>> home and car.
> 
> And the story ain't over. There are new technologies coming that will make
> the CD as obsolete as the LP record.
 
Of course!  Probably most, if not all, of our current digital media
will be unreadable by the equipment available only some 50 years or
so into the future.
 
> I sometimes wonder if we are living in a period that will become largely
> lost to history, because of the rapid changes in data storage formats. Want
> to learn what happened to a ship in 1450? The paper records still exist.
 
Future historians and archaeologists will probably wonder why we
ceased to print books around 1880 or so.  1000 years into the future,
that paper record from 1450 will probably still be readable.  Paper
records from today won't be readable though, since we print almost
everything on acid paper since about 1880, and acid paper
disintegrates after a few centuries.... this problem has recently
been recognized though, and an increasing number of publications
today are printed on acid-free paper.  Thus future historians may
then wonder why we apparently ceased to print books around 1880 but
started again around 2010 or so....
 
> Want to look at certain data from the Viking Mars landers? Sorry, those
> half-inch tapes degraded long ago, even if you had the hardware to read
> them.
 
Fortunately you're wrong here.  NASA recognized this problem about a
decade ago and then transferred all those old magnetic tapes, all
back to the tapes from the early 1960's, to CD-ROM's.  NASA did have
problems with some old tapes breaking during the data transfer, so
some data got lost.  But most of it got saved.  So if you really want
raw data from old spacecrafts, contact NASA!  They probably have a
CD-ROM with the data you want.
 
To preserve data for the future, one must of course move it to newer
media regularly. About two years ago I transferred all my old Apple
II floppies to the PC and archived them on PC floppies.  And about
one year ago, I copied all my old PC floppies to CD-ROM's --
including those Apple II disk images.  The nice thing here (so far)
is that new media holds so much more data: I could store 10 Apple II
disk images on one PC floppy (more if I compressed them first).  And
I can store 400+ PC floppies on one CD-ROM -- and some 12 CD-ROM's on
a DVD..... that means some 50,000 uncompressed Apple II disk images
on one single DVD!!!!  (I don't have that many Apple II disk images,
but you get the idea...)
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se
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