On Mon, 16 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
No offense to anyone who may be part of the project,
but that's a pipe dream.
I think a better goal is to create conversion utilities that perform
cross-conversion to/from FutureKeep format, as that is much more realistic.
I completely agree. Lessons from the past are simple to grok.
There is no complex data standard and certainly no media that has
survived long enough to be considered permanent.
My bias is towards the simple; at least then when it's
incompatible you have less raw data, and less-ambiguous work (you
hope).
The more the payload data is encumbered with organization,
formatting, compression, interpretation, etc the harder it is.
There's no universal approach, but if we're talking about mainly
floppies, a simple sector dump (note 1) with a hand-written
description of the organization would probably suffice.
An example:
* a byte stream copy (note 1) of the diskette image, say 256256
8-bit-bytes long. Even printed on paper. Who knows what OCR will
be like in 20 years?
* A scrap of paper upon which is written:
"Copied from a Shugart 801, 8", single-sided, soft-sectored,
WD1771 FM format. CP/M-80. 128 byte sectors, 26 spt, 77
tracks."
Dumb. Simple. Repeatable. Portable as anything will be after 1, 5,
10, 20 years.
NOTE 1: you can either rely on a byte today being a byte tomorrow,
or define a mapping that is unambiguous, such as a description of
the local file system's byte ordering, or use a text
representation of the numbers (disk as a string) with a Rosetta
Stone for ASCII, or define as decimal, etc.
Cruder is better. A representation of the diskette contents
consisting of:
0: 0
1: 255
2: 47
...
256253: 229
256253: 229
256255: 229
with the prose description above is more than enough to simply
recreate the diskette, whatever that means.