24 May
2005
24 May
'05
9:24 a.m.
16. VCF-ism, "Sellam is the center of his own universe." :)
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Kevin Handy
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 11:52 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: zip
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.
...