scarcity of digital preservation efforts - was Re: eBay... Yikes!

OK After TOTAL ANNHILATION (either nucular holocaust, or just one decade of "business as usual" in this industry), . . . X% (30? 50? 90?) of files are readable, or documented/reverse-engineerable. MY glass is half-empty. It doesn't take much. Death of a Don Maslin, etc. How many people here CAN (both know how, AND have the resources) to read a Vector-Graphic disk? NEC-9801 "Stand-Alone BASIC" (NOT CP/M nor MS-DOS) and NOT readable on a "normal" 1.4M drive? (trivial as a joint effort of Maslin, Sellam, Cisin (my role was to look at extracted sectors, decipher tyhe DIRectory structure, and tell them which sectors to read next), but does anybody have a WORKING machine? ) Victor 9000? (Sirius) Durango? Floptical? Stringy Floppy?? Drivetec? Micropolis M-DOS? Apple /// SOS? Apple ][ DOS? 13 SECTOR?? PRODOS? P-System? CP/M? 13 SECTOR?? RS Model 100 DVI? RS Model 100 "Portable Disk Drive"? Word-Pervert 3.x files? Electric Pencil DISK FORMAT? OK, now I know that you are immortal, . . . but, if you blue-screen, how many more people can? Early versions of Visicalc, WEIRD, etc. may have been documented (DOUBTFUL!), but where is that documentation NOW? I had a short, unprofitable, but very worthwhile career deciphering disk formats that were not documented. There were more than a dozen people who were better at it than I; how many are ALIVE? Where are those "BOOKS" that included that info? Sure, MOST files are recoverable. Is that enough? Reality check: How many people, who are NOT on this list, give a shit whether old data can be recovered? There are frequent [formula] news stories about how NASA/etc. can not find access to their own old data, but what, if anything, is being done about that "problem"? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com