27 Aug
2011
27 Aug
'11
2:23 p.m.
On 27/08/11 4:36 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
... I think society is long past the point where
information, at least most of it, just disappears from generation to
generation.
There are many ways it can disappear, and still does. As soon as a book
is removed from public libraries, and is out of print, it's effectively
gone. The mitigating factor are secondary markets like ABE Books - but
that only goes so far, and assumes you have a budget to find something.
Of course a lot of people will argue that, pointing out obscure things
which have been lost, or are at risk of being lost due to their
obscurity, but I'm talking about things like...well, the JFIF image
format. (what is commonly yet erroneously called "JPEG")
Certain things are so ubiquitous we can dismiss them, yes.
Even old, proprietary, vendor-specific formats like BMP are trivial to
find documentation for.
*Some* are trivial. Some are difficult. And others are impossible, as I
know from past searches.
Some formats have even survived fruitless,
misguided attempts to make a quick buck by teams of lawyers at
short-sighted corporations run by stupid people (GIF).
Thanks to efforts like Bitsavers, technical documentation is at
nowhere near the level of risk it was even as recently as a decade ago.
Why do you think Bitsavers is permanent? ;-)
--T
-Dave