28 Aug
2011
28 Aug
'11
6:22 p.m.
On 08/28/2011 08:17 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
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.
So you're following the Toby Thain lunacy of suggesting that it's
just as possible for human society to lose the ability to decode JFIF
images as it was to lose all those CP/M boot disks?
That's crap on so many levels. JFIF's mainstream lifetime is already
considerably longer than CP/M's ever was. Orders of magnitude more
people have worked with (i.e., written software for) JFIF decoding than
have ever even HEARD of CP/M.
Eventually a "critical mass" of information duplication is reached,
at which certain tidbits of information just Will Not Be Lost without
something like a major, population- and infrastructure-decimating
holocaust. I'm talking "bombing ourselves back to the stone age"
holocaust.
We will never lose access to JFIF, GIF, and PNG images.
PERQ? Maybe. I didn't lose access to any images due to the loss of
that file format spec. Did you? Do you know anyone who has? Do you
know anyone who knows anyone who has?
I didn't think so.
And if it were THAT important, hell, I've reverse-engineered file
formats before, as I'm sure you have as well. It's far from impossible.
It isn't 1960 anymore. TODAY'S data isn't going anywhere.
YESTERDAY'S is disappearing due to stupidity and short-sightedness, and
a big chunk of stuff in one category has been saved by the skin of its
teeth by efforts like Bitsavers.
The JFIF spec never needs to be in Bitsavers' archive.
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?
Yes, obscure stuff from decades ago has been lost.
I suppose by this logic, and Toby's, that we'd better be careful
because at some point mankind will forget how to do things like FIRE and
THE WHEEL!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL