Disasters and Recovery

Presumably you can counter the effects of gravity by rotating the capsule every 'n' units of time. As for semiconductor degredation, that can be mititgated by lower temperatures. Also when I worked at Intel we measured dopant migration which was not measurable when power was not applied. There were concerns that during operation the temperatures and electric fields generated would cause things to migrate and the chip to eventually fail. Analysis of 5 year old chips that had not been powered up showed no measurable change. Given that I don't believe the semiconductors will have a problem. However the EEPROMs and FLASHes can very well have a problem. The BIOS on most mother boards is flashed in and it requires that the system boot to flash a new bios in. Perhaps a tool to flash the bios in circuit would need to be supplied as well. I like the mylar paper tape idea. Although I cannot imagine how much tape I would need to hold a 128K byte flash image. Wait a minute, let me get some tape here .... 10 bytes/in so 13,107" or 1092' or roughly 11 100' rolls. That is a lot of tape and that is only the BIOS! I agree with Sam we may be relying on 22nd century technology to recover the bits from the mag tape. And while Tony's comments about restoring a PDP-8 or 11 are good ones, I suspect that in the 22nd century they would be able to fabricate one fairly easily. The goal is to create a snapshot of "current" computing as it is at the turn of the century. And it may be an exercise in futility to expect it to work, but my goal was to make a credible best effort to address those things (like batteries) that would be known to make it _not_ work. --Chuck