18 Jan
1999
18 Jan
'99
7:50 a.m.
Doug wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jan 1999, Sam Ismail wrote:
CD-ROM _may_ last longer than paper, but CD-ROM isn't human-readable.
There were comments that the Dead Sea scrools were on parchment rather
than paper. True. There are Egyptian papyri that are older than the
Dead Sea scrolls (some retaining quite a bit of color).
And yes, there's the chiselled stone media. If somebody can get me a
good source for affordable media, I'll start work on a printer (I
think the headstone folks have some items that could be built into a
prototype).
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
Paper will last longer than anything we've
been discussing so far (save
Where did you get that idea? Paper will disolve in just about any
solvent, including water, and is subject to tearing. Again, if we're
talking about preservation in controlled environments, a CD-ROM kicks
paper's butt.
What makes some of today's technology fragile is simply the density, or
equivalenty, the lack of redundancy in a given area. A plain old EPROM
should be fine for 100 years if you include 100 copies of the information
within it.