3 Jun
2000
3 Jun
'00
9 p.m.
How many KIDS today are collecting LPs? And how many
of their
children will collect them?
Lots more than you think! Of course, many more will start collecting when
they get older.
I believe the number of people
interested in old stuff (78 RPMs, LPs, CDs, etc...) will
decrease exponentially to one, and when he dies, thats IT!
No, not at all. The multi-billion dollar antiques market say "no". A
certain number of people will always like the past and support it.
In 100 years, CDs and players will be antiques, like
Edison's
aluminum foil recording system. They will be on display in museums,
but probably not in working condition.
A few will work, and that's what counts.
CDs have a limited lifetime,
(10 years IIRC), before they degrade to the point of being unreadable.
Don't tell tell any of my CD's that! I have quite a few oldies - first
generation pressings from the mid-1980s - and they work just as well
today as they did when pressed. To add to that, my CD player is also a
old type (remember the Index feature on CDs? I've only run across two CDs
that use them) with a far less stable tracking mechanism,but they track
and play just fine.
The bit about CDs dying prematuring is a bunch of balloon juice. While by
no means a great archival solution, they are remarkably stable when
treated properly.
CDs that are being used degrade much faster due to
scratches.
That is a fault of the users. CDs are actually very easy to keep
scratch-free, but it does take some discipline (like using the jewel
boxes that way they were designed).
The
information stored on the discs won't be interesting enough in ten
years to copy to alternate media except for a 'small, almost religious,
group'. When they die off, the information is trapped in a unusable
format until your grad students build a reader.
The 'small, religious groups' are also remarkably long-lived, and
actually have professional associations and such. They know the problems
with old media, and are actually doing work on it.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org