Re: Pseudoarchaeology in Australia


"David Johnson"
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"Peter Jason" <pj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
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"David Johnson"
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"Peter Jason" <pj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
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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


I used to have streamer-tape backups but they
were slow and noisy and I do most backups
with the "Norton Ghost" gizmo.

Having transferred storable materials on to
DVDs a while ago everything has shrunk in
size, and I expect to do the same thing again
when the "Blu-ray" disks are commonly
available. Optical disks are made in
"archive" grade consisting of super plastics
and a gold metallic layer - though I haven't
seen these yet. What the current media lacks
in durability is more than made up for in the
ease of copying to identical types or up to
the latest technology. Eg for my scans of
old family photos I simply ran off 20 or so
copies on DVDs and handed them to any
relative interested (they all were) so
increasing the chance of endless survival.
Computers are great for cataloguing & sorting
too. I read somewhere that data might be
stored in crystal lattices or carbon-molecule
arrays each of which should have the
durability of old pottery. Just thing of
the great joy afforded to archaeologists in
millennia hence when they can read all of the
Usenet posts; it will like a mega-Pepy's
diary!


.

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