Re: Pseudoarchaeology in Australia

"Peter Jason" <pj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:fb7e8p$1j72$1
@otis.netspace.net.au:


"David Johnson"
<trolleyfan_nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message
news:Xns999C911C41858trolleyfan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Peter Jason" <pj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:fb5tau$131d$1
@otis.netspace.net.au:

At the moment I am photo-recording the
alleyways and mundane images of the
central
city area here (things no-one would
normally
take pictures of) and these images may be
of
interest 100 years hence. Sometimes the
background in the typical grinning-people
photo is of great interest.


Assuming, of course, the format you save
them in both lasts a century _and_
is readable in any fashion by folk a
century hence...

There was a comedy ("Spirit of 76") that
had people in the future lose all
history in an event called "The Great
Degaussing..." ;)

David

I think Gauss is a magnetism-strength unit.
In 1976 it was all magnetic recording of
info, but today it's all done on laser disks
and no magnetism is involved.

Degaussing is a fancy way to say demagnetizing - or in the case of
magnetic media, bulk erasing.

And, hey, I did say _comedy_.

BTW, the movie's from 1990.

Anyway, if papyrus can survive for 1000s of
years, other media have a good chance.

Papyrus - especially when kept in the ultra-dry environment of an
Egyptian tomb - is a very stable material.

CD's (and DVDs and such) are only rated for a 75 year lifespan, and
that's probably more supplier puffery than actual reality. In practice, a
lot of things can easily disrupt/damage/destroy them, from simple
scratches to the enemy of most things plastic: heat.

I'll be surprised if more than a tiny fraction survive past twenty years
in a readable state.

And the main problem is that "readable state" requires a reader. Given
change in the computer field, that "tiny fraction" of surviving CDs very
well might not have anything to be played on in twenty years.

Just today, in fact, I tossed out some old software here at the library.
Why? Well, apart from the fact that it was designed to run on DOS (and
thus doesn't work well - or often at all - on an XP machine, to say
nothing of Vista), the install software came on 5 1/4 floppies.

Even assuming they're still good - which is probably not the case - I
don't have access to a 5 1/4 drive and haven't for a good ten years. Ten
more years, and I won't be able to find a 3 1/2 drive either. Which means
that anything on those disks is simply...gone.

Admittedly, it's still possible to find (working examples of) those older
drives, if you search hard enough and if you do it within the next ten or
fifteen years or so. But even that'll end eventually.

Right now (assuming they can find all of them in the first place) the
original downloaded data (including images and voice) from the Apollo
missions is stored on tape that exactly _one_ machine - that's _one_
machine - in the whole world can still read. And the only reason that one
machine still exists, is a couple of researchers at NASA saved it from
being tossed a few years back.

Apollo was just 35-40 years ago - and done back when the speed of
electronic change wasn't quite as fast as now - and all the original data
is just _that_ close disappearing...assuming it hasn't already.*

So, no, I don't think that current "other media" has a good chance of
"survive [ing] for 1000s of years" - or even a hundred. Come, oh say,
2050, every single piece of electronic information that hasn't been
migrated along the way to different formats (probably five or ten
different times) will be basically lost for good. And if civilization has
one of those "setbacks" know in the business as a "collapse," then
_everything_ electronic will be gone for good.

Honestly, the bits of papyrus from Egypt that are _already_ three-
thousand year old have a better chance to survive the _next_ thousand (or
even hundred) years than anything we have now that's measured in
kilobytes...

David

* http://tinyurl.com/29oamb

--
_______________________________________________________________________
David Johnson home.earthlink.net/~trolleyfan

"So many of you come time and time again to watch this final end of
everything which I think is really wonderful and then to return home to
your own eras and raise families and strive for new and better societies
and fight terrible wars for what you know is right, it gives one real
hope for the whole future of lifekind...

....Except of course we know it hasn't got one."

.

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