Re: Is ProDOS supported in OSX?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20030625041241.09942.00000955@mb-m26.aol.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
 
> 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.  ;-)
 
Well, the format for punched cards is well-documented too.  So what
would you do if you received a large deck of punched cards which
contained data you wanted?
 
1. Try to locate some punched card reader you could use?
 
2. Read the specification in books and implement a new card reader
from scratch?
 
3. Give up?
 
> 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).
 
Scientific data should preferably NOT be stored in some lossy
compression format, like JPEG ......
 
> 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.)
 
If we're talking about thousands of years, we probably need to be
concerned about the survival of our culture.  Go a few thousand years
back and you might end up in pharaonic Egypt; their language was
lost for many centuries, and the writings they left behind remained
undecipherable until fairly recently.
 
Unspecified digital data will be even harder to decipher than
egyptian hieroglyphs.  This includes opcodes for some abstract
machine.
 
>> 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.
 
Yes, I know about that problem too.  However, the world's collection
of glass plates is at least not growning significantly anymore.
 
-- 
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