24 May
2005
24 May
'05
8:51 a.m.
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
On Fri, 20 May 2005, Tony Duell wrote:
Future computer historians (or even current ones for that matter) won't
necessarily have the computer skills necessary to track down or even use
tar.
Why is it assumed that people in the future will be complete idiots?
Like current library technicians, who cannot possibly figure out the
technology of books that were printed more than 100 years ago.
It's impossible for them to figure out how to "turn the page", and are
struggling with the strange concept of "letters". And those "book"
things don't even taste very good.
These stupid people won't have any concept of a computer, so it is
unlikely that they will be able to read a tape, cd, etc. You will have
to carve the data on stone blocks in foot high letters.
Would they even know of "English"? You better make sure that the
data has been converted into cartoons without captions, like those
"spy-vs-spy" ones, because they will be too dumb to handle anything
more complex than that. The cartoons will probably be stretching
the limits of their minuscule brain-power.
Especially
for long term archiving, I think that things like simple, open
formats are more important than making sure that everyone's grandma can
figure out how to use the archive... ie, assuming that the person has a
grasp of being able to learn new things, and some idea of logic are IMO
reasonable assumptions.
You alos need to consider what is the most likely sort of person to want
to access this archive. It's an archive of boot disks, PROMs, etc for
what are _now_ somewhat obscure computers, and which will presumably be
even more obscure in the future. The sort of person to need that sort of
data is likely to have quite a bit of computer knowledge already, and is
not going to have problesm with tracking down a copy of gnu tar or
similar....
It's not just technical people who will be
interested in this stuff.
It will also interest the priests, like the Spanish priests who demanded
that all the Inca codex's be destroyed, and the people brought all they
could find to the priests to be burned; they couldn't read them, thus
they were obviously about devil warship.
So, you better hide the archive so that it cannot be found by priests,
or anyone who might know any priests; they cannot possibly understand
tar format, thus they will assume it must be evil and destroy it.
And to make sure they won't actively search it out, you better
make sure it confirms to all possible religious beliefs:
1. The earth is flat.
2. The sun and planets go around the earth.
3. Rome is the center of the universe.
4. China is the center of the universe.
5. Mexico is the center of the universe.
6. Mount Olympus is the center of the universe.
7. The world was created in 7 days.
8. The world was created from Budda's navel.
9. The stars are mounted on a fixed celestial globe.
10. There is no such thing as evolution.
11. It's Ok, even required, to kill anyone of another religion.
12. Killing them in the most brutal, slow, and painful ways
will gain you brownie points in the next life.
13. Oral sex isn't sex.
14. Microsoft is the center of the universe.
15. The earth sits on the back of a giant tortoise.
...