25 May
2005
25 May
'05
4:17 p.m.
On Wed, 25 May 2005, Kevin Handy wrote:
But will you agree that it at least makes things easier if the archives
are in a plain format? Would the Rosetta Stone have been any help if the
heiroglyphics had been transcribed to papyrus, then rolled up and stuffed
in a sack to make them easier to distribute and store? No, it would not.
The papyrus would have crumbled to dust.
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
Actually, your point was this:
So tell me then how to read the information from a
Quipu. It's a simple
device: just a bunch of multi-colored knotted string. If you can figure
this out, there's a huge community of archaeologists who study the Incas
who would erect a permanent shrine for you to celebrate your name for all
eternity.
This is my point. 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.
You were being facetious of course, but I was not.
The quipu was apparently their equivalent of our
spreadsheet. They were easy for them to use, and easily understood.
They aren't even "compressed", "tarred", or "zipped",
but still lost.
Once many could "write"/read them, and they were meant for long
term archival use (at least many seem to have been archived). As
easy as it was for them, and as important as they thought these
documents were, we are unable to read them.
I would imagine you'd agree that we are pretty smart and that the Quipu is
pretty simple, yet we still have not successfully decoded their meaning.
They thought it was good for long term storage, but we
haven't a clue
as to how to read them. What is so different about computer archives,
no matter how simple it seems to us, that ours wouldn't suffer the
same fate.
So getting back to the point, why make archives even more complex by
wrapping the riddle in an enigma?
The ancient
Egyptians were by all measures a fairly advanced society for
their place in history, yet the only reason we know how to read their
heiroglyphic writings is because we found teh Rosetta Stone that basically
translated it for us. Again, you cannot assume English will be known in
the future.
Same point. The Egyptians thought it was good enough, and easy
enough, for use as a long term archive (see all the obelisks they
made). We still lost the understanding of how to understand them.
How much simpler can you get than "cartoons" carved in stone?
Yet we still lost the ability to read them for a thousand+ years.
Will there be a Rosetta stone to help future people to
understand a long lost CP/M archive? I don't care how
"simple" you think a storage format is, it won't help it
in the long run. The archive should be for our own use, not some
theoretical idiot 2000
years from now trying to boot a Kaypro. He's probably going to have a
whole different set of problems with an archive than we could conceive;
like locating the "any" key.
Right, so don't make the archives more complex than they need to be.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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