23 May
2005
23 May
'05
5:42 p.m.
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.
It's not just technical people who will be interested in this stuff.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
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....