19 May
2005
19 May
'05
12:21 p.m.
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
LONGTERM the information will have been translated to new
media/medium by then.
There is no guarantee of this. None whatsoever. Unless you can predict
the future, in which case why are you wasting your time with me when you
should be out controlling the world? ;)
:-)
:)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 10:43:09AM -0700, Vintage
Computer Festival wrote:
You preserved the information. Well done. But by putting it inside a ZIP
archive and making THAT your distribution medium, you've made a fantastic
error.
See Dwight's last reply re: archivist
standards. Putting stuff in a ZIP
file is NOT archiving.
For me, archiving has always been about preserving information. It
has had nothing to do with the transport mechanism of that
information. ZIP is a transport mechanism; an encoding of
information, just like an ASCII file is an encoding of information.
If I have an old hardware manual, and I scan it, OCR it
(accurately!) to text, format the text in the same way it is typeset
in the book (ie. to preserve tables, equations, etc.) and do so via
HTML, and put it on the web -- did I not just archive the book? If
all of the information is available, what's the big deal? What is
lost in the translation? I see people on the thread complaining about having to
bundle a
windows emulator with each archive. Excuse me? Let's look at some
popular formats: TAR, ZIP, RAR all have source-code unarchivers.
Which means they can run on any machine with a C compiler. So
what's with all the paranoia? Just use whatever works as long as
more than one major platform can extract it.
For now. What about 1 year from now? 5 years? 10 years? 50 years? 100
years? 500 years?
Think LONGTERM. If LONGTERM is truly a concern then why is the
information being
stored as ASCII data files at all?
Perhaps because ASCII is "the bottom"? There's no where else to go.
I can think of a lot more durable information
transport mechanisms than
hard disks or magnetic tape...
With denser data storage?
(Not directed at Sellam, just commenting on all thread
participants.)
Ain't no thang ;)