19 May
2005
19 May
'05
6:09 p.m.
From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at
siconic.com>
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
Thanks Sellam
I'm debating even keeping things in ASCII for long term. Binary
is close to the original but lacks the ability to add format type
information. I still like to keep it human readable in something
like ASCII. ASCII has a relatively long history in the computer
industry. Once the information has been determined, by some future
computer geek, to be recoverable he( or she ) can quickly write
a translation program to bring it into the current environment.
In any case, these are all academic in comparison to the problems
of indexing. I don't even have the beginings of how to deal
with that problem.
Dwight
Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
You're interpretting what Dwight is saying within your own context.
Dwight is referring to the content itself, not the media on which the
content (The Archive) is stored. It seems that may of you are missing the point.
The archives
are intended to be useable in say 500 years ( moved to
future media ). Any proprietary application like WinRAR
is useless for this purpose.
I think that *you* are missing the point that *no* archive can last that long
except maybe paper. (I say this because the media reader for paper is... all humans. 100 years from now I wouldn't expect
to be able to read a
DVD-ROM, for comparison.) Most digital archivsts agree that the goal is
not 100 years, but 10-20 so that it can be transferred to the new
generation of media every so often.
This is now a given to anyone that's given it a couple moment's thought.