In article <CC28F43ED4708D489ABCF68D06D7F55604243E4577 at 505DENALI.corp.vnw.com>, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> writes: They haven't and you don't. Its just another person thinking that they have hit gold because LQQK! I HAVE SOMETHING OLD, IT MUST BE R at RE!! -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

This manual is really only somewhat rare. -- Will

honeywell had one PDP-1 they probably had 100 engineers using it or designing for it. I don't know how many had Dec manuals, but I have the engineering notes of a fellow who had both the original documents and copies. they were doing a variety of projects, and moved on with other PDP's with their subsequent work, but started with a lot of people using the PDP as a potential asset. Some of the memos have fairly long cc: lists, and I know several seem to have been managers, so the 100 might be on the high side, but there were a lot of managers with minions on the list in 62 or 63 for the info. I don't agree bullshit, but agree with Bill's somewhat description. Who knows how many will jump out of dad's or grandpa's pile, or get burned? I recently rescued some Lunar Orbitor 1 photographs, and may get some other artifacts, so something as mundane as PDP1 documents must rank below that when the people who go thru estates see things. (saying if they missed space stuff, we are probably way behind that). Jim

----- Original Message ----- From: "jim s" <jws at jwsss.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 5:24 PM Subject: Re: eBay... Yikes! (PDP-1 Handbook) How many people saved old computer manuals compared to Lunar Orbiter photographs? I might be wrong but photographs are not that pricey, original negatives on the other hand are (you can make a million pictures from those). Rarity and value are two different things anyway.

----- Original Message ----- From: "TeoZ" <teoz at neo.rr.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 11:59 PM Subject: Re: eBay... Yikes! (PDP-1 Handbook) original erm.. with (amateur) photography going digital, how would we get photographs Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: Personally my computer lab was recently taken apart in order to make room for my Darkroom. I have two enlargers, one is for up to 120 roll film, the second handles up to 4x5" negatives. Both of mine are quiet old, but you can still purchase new enlargers. For that matter, you can still purchase new film cameras. In the last year, I've shifted back to mainly shooting film. I can also scan 35mm through 4x5" negatives (I can shoot up to 8x10"), but when doing B&W I prefer to print on traditional B&W paper. For colour, I'll take the digital files to Costco, or some other place that can do prints (I will typically get traditional prints when I first have the film developed). Zane

On Mon, 29 Aug 2011, Paul Anderson wrote: How much would you have to modify Apple ][ cases?

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: They are now "hard to get rid of". Once scanned, many programs include options for reversal, and even filtering out the dye-mask of color negatives.

loves my zorki-4 though i only use it once in a blue moon its still fun to take out On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>wrote:

On 08/26/2011 01:28 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I'm right there with you on that. Fortunately, nearly all of them that are actually being used anywhere are well-documented. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

I suspect the docuemantion for the PERQ image processing software and file formats is long gone, but... Anyway, they may be docuemnted _now_ but in 100 eyars time (or whatever) it may not even be obviosu that it is an image file. If you take a film or glass plate negative it's clear rto anyone (with reasonable eyesight) that there is an image on it. It's also possible, jsut byu loking at it to see roughtly what that image is, and that the intensities are inverted. So you try the obviuos things to get the image back. But given a digital image file, it's not obvious from looking at the bytes that it even is an image, let alone how to decode it. -tony

On 08/27/2011 01:37 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Would you consider that to be a format in which large volumes of images are stored today? ;) Too true. But I think society is long past the point where information, at least most of it, just disappears from generation to generation. Of course a lot of people will argue that, pointing out obscure things which have been lost, or are at risk of being lost due to their obscurity, but I'm talking about things like...well, the JFIF image format. (what is commonly yet erroneously called "JPEG") Even old, proprietary, vendor-specific formats like BMP are trivial to find documentation for. Some formats have even survived fruitless, misguided attempts to make a quick buck by teams of lawyers at short-sighted corporations run by stupid people (GIF). Thanks to efforts like Bitsavers, technical documentation is at nowhere near the level of risk it was even as recently as a decade ago. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/27/2011 05:23 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Of course. (and I knew someone was going to pipe up...this group is WAY too anal ;)) And those things are the ones I'm talking about. We will never lose the spec for the JFIF file format because the whole world uses it. We will also never lose (assuming we have it now) the PERQ image file format because there are people like us around. Yes, there are fringe cases, and some information WILL be lost. But do you honestly think it's the same percentage as it was, say, in 1960? Or even 1980? Not even close. THAT is my point. Yes. There are always exceptions and fringe cases. Because we will make it so, and pass it on to future generations. Bulk replication of data like that is trivial now. It wasn't just a few short years ago. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/28/2011 12:45 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Good heavens. Do you really think it takes a bunch of hobbyists maintaining obscure information to preserve, say, the spec for GIF, JFIF, and PNG? In the case of file formats that actually get used NOW, hell, those specs are printed in dozens of books by several different publishers in many different languages, and sold by the thousands. And that's not even counting digital archives. This is a non-problem. Of course, as people here love to do, it's certainly possible to point out unbelievably obscure stuff (ahem, Perq) but we were talking about mainstream image formats. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/28/2011 04:44 PM, Toby Thain wrote: As examples in this discussion? Because we were talking about common image formats, and someone asserted that all image formats are evil because the specs for everything will be lost. As such, with the vast, VAST majority of images in the world today being in one of those formats, it is actually an excellent example. Formats that people actually USE? No. Sure, there ARE some proprietary formats out there, and I'm sure there are some poor saps who use them from time to time. Your insistence that these obscure cases are somehow the norm is amusing. For the formats that actually get used, unless we undergo some sort of a friggin' holocaust or something, said documentation will always be available. And even if we DO have some sort of a holocaust, I'm sure somewhere there will be at least ONE remaining copy of one of the hundreds of thousands of books printed on the subject. Even vertical-market imaging formats used in the world of astronomy, physics, and medicine are (mostly) standardized and documented these days. Stop with the doom-saying. Yes. And the 10% of the world that uses TIFF (as nice a format as it is) has maybe 10% of THAT using proprietary extensions. People that use them should probably move to a documented format. Gee, I open PSD files in GIMP all day long, works just fine here. Maybe there are some weird features that won't be properly decoded, but I can SEE THE DAMN IMAGE just fine, and isn't that the point, in the context in which we're discussing this? But even ignoring that...your supposed all-destructive holocaust is going to destroy EVERY REMAINING COPY of Adobe Photoshop, along with EVERY COMPUTER capable of running it? This is just ludicrous. Some peoples' obsession with pointing out obscure corner cases and insisting that they are somehow the norm is entertaining at first, but very quickly becomes old. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

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. 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? OK, now I know that you are immortal, . . . but, if you blue-screen, how many more people can? Early versions of Visicalc, WEIRD, etc. may have been documented (DOUBTFUL!), but where is that documentation NOW? I had a short, unprofitable, but very worthwhile career deciphering disk formats that were not documented. There were more than a dozen people who were better at it than I; how many are ALIVE? Where are those "BOOKS" that included that info? Sure, MOST files are recoverable. Is that enough? Reality check: How many people, who are NOT on this list, give a shit whether old data can be recovered? There are frequent [formula] news stories about how NASA/etc. can not find access to their own old data, but what, if anything, is being done about that "problem"? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

http://pds.nasa.gov/ Every bit of every mission. -- Will

At 07:46 PM 8/28/2011, Chuck Guzis wrote: I was still talking with Tom Jennings about it in 2005. Sellam was, too. I have a tar of it. To me, it was a data problem. Why support the ancient sorta-database that drove it? Custom flat-file database massaged by custom Perl that emitted HTML? How quaint by today's measure. It should've become something like a wiki, and the dead media it described are probably within Wikipedia by now with greater detail. Then again, the visitor-contributed stories were of great value, too, and Wikipedia doesn't really handle that except by external link. But to maintain my old curmudgeon certification, I guess I'll need to add that contemporary CMS and blog software tends to frustrate my needs and desires. I'd like to pour my brain and ramblings into a web, but I keep wanting something that's more like a newspaper or an encyclopedia and not a blog. - John

I have long wished that my brain had either a SCSI or ethernet port (RS232 would not have enough bandwidth IMHO) so I could make a backup of it. There must be some useful stuff in there... -tony

----- Original Message ----- From: "Sridhar Ayengar" <ploopster at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 4:38 PM Subject: Re: scarcity of digital preservation efforts - was Re: eBay... Yikes! You guys never heard of wireless? Maybe there isn't that much useful stuff to back up after all. ;)

More than would be practical to copy using RS232 or SCSI. NO, I'm NOT going to suggest USB! On Tue, 30 Aug 2011, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Try MANY years. While a little animation shows pages of paper fluttering from one box to another, . . . (with postitions for the animation images calculated in floating point?) Could that same wire also, while waiting?, stimulate pleasure centers? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Fred Cisin wrote: At 10Gbps? Isn't 100Gbps about to come out? Peace... Sridhar

On 28/08/11 8:17 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Even the White House - who you might consider would have the means to preserve them - cannot seem to stop losing email archives. Though, this may not be for technical reasons... I would bet that the rate of commercial data loss is much greater than we will hear about, both due to embarrassment, and risks of legal problems for individuals and the companies involved. Combined with the general notorious lack of prudence in the industry with respect to technical decisions in software and hardware... --Toby

On 28/08/11 9:33 PM, William Donzelli wrote: I resisted :) --T

On Sun, 28 Aug 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: no, Toby and I are speculating that technical know-how and literacy could lose out to the forces of idiocy.

On 29/08/11 12:12 AM, Dave McGuire wrote: Nobody is disagreeing with you on such obvious cases. Also sufficient: source code. Open source has an unconquerable advantage here, over proprietary. --Toby

On 8/29/11 8:40 AM, William Donzelli wrote: Who toss legacy hardware support at an alarming rate because it's too much work. Linux is an extreme example of this. NetBSD pretty much the opposite. They also thrash on the 'fun' parts of systems (GNOME/KDE look and feel) and don't bother with the dirty, un-fun parts of making systems stable for the real world. I don't know how far back they ever found it, but Stallman/FSF were hunting for GNU distributions because they didn't have a complete archive of what they had released. I had looked at the problem of archiving open source projects for CHM and couldn't get my head around what to consider important. Sourceforge was filled with half-baked abandoned projects, and now I don't even know where to start with the half-baked abandoned web sites trying to be Sourceforge. I also don't agree that modern software systems are in a better state to be preserved. In the 'old days' you could get a shrink-wrapped package that was the entire deal, docs, and media. Today, it's a blob that comes off the web and gets patched very frequently, as well as potentially being tied to the mother-ship to be functional. There are dozens (hundreds?) of products now that are devices that were tethered to dead back-end services (Danger Sidekick). How do you even start to preserve this? The direction the world is heading with computers is making it very, very difficult to preserve.

Will any current linux version run on an 80386 processor? I was under the distinct impression that they don't (in fact they may not even run on an 80486). -tony

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 07:23:38PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: At least Debian still ships 486 kernels, which comes in handy for a lot of folks whose embedded systems use some kind of 486 compatible CPU. For 386, well, you might have problems running straight current distros, as they tend to assume at least a 486, but if you rebuild the kernel (and maybe the userland, but that might not be needed), it should work. You are far more likely to run head on into the wall of ressource constraints. While I did run a carefully handcrafted Linux system on a 486 box with 4 MB of RAM as a mobile file server (old, crapped out laptop[0]) 11 years ago, modern distros tend to assume quite a bit of memory. Not many 386 machines with 32+ MB of memory around ... Kind regards, Alex. [0] Building that was fun. IIRC back then OpenBSD died in kernel init, NetBSD died before loading the installer, FreeBSD died in the installer and somehow I got Linux to boot. After stripping both kernel and running userland to the absolute minimum (IIRC, running user processes after boot where init & 2 gettys, after logging in on the console the machine was 4 MB deep in swap and paging all the time), I still managed to get around 150 .. 200 KB/s NFS read performance out of that box. Enough for listening to MP3s while working at a clients site ;-) -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On 08/29/2011 02:23 PM, Tony Duell wrote: The "distros" may not, but the code base certainly does. Remember Linux is used in a great many embedded devices. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/30/2011 05:02 PM, Jochen Kunz wrote: NetBSD has? Are you certain? I'm willing to bet otherwise, but I don't know for sure. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/31/2011 02:35 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote: We should look into this. NetBSD, like Linux, is used in lots of embedded applications. In particular it use is common in digital cameras. Most of them have surely gone ARM by now (like everything else) but the 80386EX was very common in that world; I can't imagine they've disappeared overnight. And besides, those types of issues would easily have been solved by conditional compilation via kernel config file options, which is (as I'm sure you know) generally how the NetBSD crowd addresses such problems. Not everyone runs Xen. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

In article <CANij+deo3in6w9hWaXWUxSk=G9K5y3kLGcXcqQUYJTOmR5zVaw at mail.gmail.com>, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes: I think what he means is that open source file formats tend to be less opaque than others because you have the data definition and the associated behavior as open source code. These days I hear people worrying about vendor lockin with their data formats and choosing open source interchange or data formats for the very reason that it keeps their intellectual property investment free of any vendor. Its still not a majority of people talking about those issues, but more people talk about it now than before. I know that people who work on 3D model content think about this quite a bit when they make their living as a content provider. If their content is locked up in a binary format specific to one tool vendor, then they can't readily switch tools or have confidence that their IP investment is accessible should the tool become unavailable. Sometimes this can simply be that their license expired and they don't want to renew it just to access their data. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On 29/08/11 2:03 PM, William Donzelli wrote: That's an understatement. Open source powers almost the entire web and its infrastructure. One wouldn't know when to stop listing: DNS, http, RDBMS, SMTP, just about every acronym out there has a best of breed open source server. Then we can talk about gcc, *BSD, Linux, ... Just all rubbish, isn't it. --Toby

On 08/29/2011 09:01 PM, William Donzelli wrote: soda -> keyboard -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/29/2011 08:18 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Here's one area in which we agree wholeheartedly. It's really the only practical way to get that sort of stuff done. That has always been the case, and it likely always will be. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/29/2011 08:49 AM, Toby Thain wrote: But those are the ones we're talking about. If people are saving images in weird, undocumented, known-by-a-handful-of-people image formats, they're effectively screwing themselves (and their images) in the future. All the smart people in the world can't save idiots from themselves. Much of the world is dysfunctional due to stupidity; there will always be some casualties because of this. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/30/2011 04:47 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Now that would be downright silly, wouldn't it, suggesting that people use a file format before it has been devised. There were, however, standardized, documented, and widely-supported file formats before that time. Picking the most obscure, least-supported one during that time would be stupid, just as it would be now. And, by the way, we can still read those file formats. Further, JFIF has been around for a LONG time. Care to estimate the number of digital images in existence before its inception, as a percentage of the total number of digital images in existence now? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/30/2011 07:46 PM, Toby Thain wrote: People rarely give a thought to much of ANYTHING, which is the root of the problem. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 30/08/11 4:14 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Then, since nobody disagrees with you on JFIF, PNG and GIF, why is this thread continuing? Maybe it's because your summary of the situation (use these three or be deservedly screwed) is over-simple. Image processing and archiving (not to mention file preservation in general) goes far, far beyond this handful of web-oriented formats. In fact JFIF, PNG and GIF cannot even _represent_ many of the images that millions of people use every day. --Toby

On 30/08/11 8:29 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: How inconvenient! What's that got to do with it? The web and digital photography helped these three become ubiquitous. But as soon as you get into professional image processing you often need something more sophisticated. Just curious: are the tape and wire formats for DV video openly documented? What about HD and professional/film formats? What if somebody asked you to decode 100TB of video from 2011 one day... --T

On 30 Aug 2011 at 21:26, TeoZ wrote: So who's got the code to render Hebrew-alphabet data from a Compugraphic typesetter on 8" floppy into ASCII? Not atypical of what I see--and often fail at. No Rosetta stone. --Chuck

On 08/30/2011 09:10 PM, Toby Thain wrote: About as much as you're sticking the subsentence "web-oriented" in the sentence above. Riiiiight. Like PSD for example, which is documented. Perhaps not WELL, but it's documented. (as you know intimately from your work on that parser) Then I'll figure it out, and send them a big fat bill. Look, you are being a dick. Someone asserted that digital photography is inferior to film photography because we are almost certainly going to lose the spec to the formats that are in common use (which is so unlikely to as to be effectively impossible, it isn't friggin' 1970 anymore!) and everybody knows film photography is better because negatives last forever. (which is bull to begin with, as proven by my big box of disintegrating 35-year-old Tri-X-Pan negatives) THAT is what we're talking about. Not proprietary undocumented image formats that comprise maybe 1/10 of 1% of all digital imaging done in the world today. 99.9% of today's digital images will not be lost, barring a complete global holocaust. Which is [drumroll please] what we were actually talking about. Go find something useful to do, and stop trying to provoke me into saying you're being a dick...because I've just done so. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

don't forget raw files On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 7:03 AM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>wrote:

On 8/31/2011 7:51 PM, Toby Thain wrote: I don't believe Nikon or Canon (or others) have released the spec for their RAW formats which differ per manufacturer. Nikon claims to offer the spec and/or SDK to "bona fide" developers --- but I have no idea how you might qualify for this distinction. Nikon "encrypts" the white balance information using data from the other publicly readable fields. It is trivially decrypted. I'm pretty sure I've read photoshop books mentioning the fact that even Adobe had (has) to reverse engineer the formats. In any case, there are multiple websites that list the basic format of the files, they are supported in most 3rd party programs, under dcraw, and so on. Adobe does have their Digital Negative .DNG, which is publicly documented, the spec. available online and so forth. They push people to convert their raw camera files to .DNG which is fine --- but of course any proprietary extensions that Adobe doesn't reverse engineer or have a corresponding field to is simply not copied and 'lost' in the conversion. Keith

On 08/31/2011 08:50 PM, Toby Thain wrote: *sigh* I guess you really don't have anything better to do. What you said might be true if the only way these cameras stored data was in "RAW" format. Fortunately, this is not the case. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/31/2011 09:34 PM, Toby Thain wrote: I agree with this 100%, for the same reasons you're aware of. However, at issue here is whether or not the images will be LOST simply because they're stored digitally, which is, at this point, all but impossible. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/31/2011 10:07 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Yes, I will concede that storing data in proprietary, undocumented, "suitware" formats puts that data at tremendous risk of loss. Smart people don't do it. Dumb people get what they've got coming. Yes. :-( -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 31/08/11 10:08 PM, Keith Monahan wrote: If the camera supports it. Exactly. And what about the colour profile? If one is embedded, can you use and interpret it? So how DO we fix this? Stallman's spent the past 25 years trying to get this concept through thick heads. Sure, he started the biggest software revolution in history, but until we break reliance on closed-proprietary-obsolescent code (such as camera firmware and drivers), we live in a house of cards. Often it's commercial users who are the most screwed. TL;DR: The open source revolution has barely impacted _devices_ (including computer components & peripherals). It's rather important (to pros) if it's the only uncompressed alternative to JPEG. --Toby

psosible to have a program that can handle some TIFF files and not ohters, for ecxample. I don;t see that as a solution. In an _ideal_ world, every image would also be printed at a high resolution on archival paper :-). And it would also be converted to a standrd (e.g. JFIF) format, even though this results in loss of qualtiy, just in case that's all that could be read in the future. But as we all know, things don't always happen like that. The point bing that the image to need to recover <n> years from now may never have been converted to TIFF or DNG or whatecer. Or the DNG fiel may be corrupt., [...] That;'s not the same problem at all. From where I am sitting I can see a dozen film cameeras with interchangable leses, all with different mouts, regiser distancs, etc. So, no, I can;t take the lens from an Exakta Varex and put it on a Miranda Sensorex, or from a Werra and put it on an Olympus Pen FT, or wahtever .But once I've taken the photograph using the lens/body of my choice ,the resulting film negative can be printed withouit refernce to the camear that took it. In other words, if you gave be a roll of 120 film negativs from a 'blad (a camera I don't own), I could print them. I don;t have to worry that the lens from my Pentacon 6 would not fit that camera. This is most certainly not true of handling RAW digital image files. I am dern sure my Nikon doesn't do this... -tony

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: aww good old coast to coast am

On 08/31/2011 08:03 AM, Toby Thain wrote: Understood. That is very sad. I guess they "go through the motions" so they can claim they've released the spec, but it's not complete enough to enable someone to truly take advantage of the format. Is it at least the case that someone can "see the damn image" (which is usually the end point of digital imaging anyway) even if a lot of the metadata, layering, etc etc aren't usable? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/31/2011 07:45 PM, Toby Thain wrote: I hear you there. But what about getting just a human-usable version of the image, without all the metadata? The original discussion here was comparing the non-losability of film-based images (which is a farce anyway, as negatives do deteriorate over time no matter how well-kept they are) which won't have all that metadata anyway. If the "flattened" image isn't present in a particular PSD file (is it possible for it not to be?) is it at all possible to "get there from here", as it were? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

True, but that also depends on what type of media the digital stuff is stored on. -Dave On 09/02/2011 02:56 AM, Adrian Stoness wrote: -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Yes, but a (high resolution) digital image takes an awful lot of reels of paper tape to store it.... -tony [...]

wonder how big a peac of tape u would need to store a 1meg jpeg in octal would be let along a raw file lol

On 02/09/2011 21:40, Adrian Stoness wrote: Well that's easy to work out. Standard 8-level tape is 10 chars/inch and if each byte in the file is encoded as three octal characters you need 3,145,728 characters. Just under 8km of tape. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 02/09/11 2:43 PM, Tony Duell wrote: A decent 35mm colour transparency carries about 35 megabytes of 8 bit RGB or CMYK (10-15 megapixels, roughly). --Toby

speaking of obscure what on either would this program be? http://www.flickr.com/photos/1ajs/6109885397/in/photostream/lightbox/

strings? On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 6:34 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:

And a very useful program it is too. I find it's always worth attacking a ROM image with strings(1) to see if I can find a command table or similar. -tony

On 03/09/11 2:33 PM, Tony Duell wrote: It works both ways. If you needed to archive 60,000 35mm transparencies, you might prefer a 2TB hard disk drive to the alternative. --Toby

At 01:47 AM 9/2/2011, Dave McGuire wrote: No, and that's the point he was making. A PhotoShop file probably contains bitmaps, but it also contains all sorts of other info (Bezier paths, masks, who knows what) that is feed-stock for proprietary Adobe code in PhotoShop, or maybe for third-party plug-ins you own. You call it lock-in, someone else calls it twenty years of refined algorithms. - John

On 02/09/11 10:44 AM, John Foust wrote: Amusingly, no, the format has no way to indicate its omission, so if you don't choose "Maximise Compatibility" when saving, Photoshop saves a dummy flattened image that says "Nothing to see here, move along" in English, Japanese, German and French. There is a complex PDF-based format for text objects. Layer effects. Adjustments. 3D objects (!!). It's hard even to keep up with the bells and whistles that each version of Photoshop adds; I stopped using it professionally in 2004. The only complete behavioural reference is the code itself (just like MSOOXML)... and we're not allowed to see that. :) PhotoShop, The algorithms aren't necessarily very fancy (for example, glow and shadow effects), but even so, reverse engineering them would be excessively difficult. --Toby

On 28/08/11 9:48 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: And so you bring the thread back on topic, like a death row reprieve - but on such a depressing note. :( --Toby

You know, I worry less about obscure formats than I do the total loss/editing of history on the web. Information being suddenly "reclassified" by governments, embarrassing content being deleted or ambitious lawyers getting whole websites wiped from existence. Very 1984-ish. We're writing the history of our civilization in sand. --Chuck

We've always written in sand. But now we're melting it, because we think that silicon lasts.

is the Sorry, to jump in a few days late but with people pushing for using "cloud" services I believe we are pretty much already there (e.g. YouTube, Flicker etc.). Personally, I much prefer having originals in my possession and only having backups in online accounts. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

On 9/2/2011 7:54 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: You mean like GeoCities where you pay or we delete your data. I say a good 10% hits from google still are from them on my web searches. Ben.

----- Original Message ----- From: "ben" <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2011 3:00 AM Subject: Re: scarcity of digital preservation efforts - was Re: eBay... Yikes! Is that an example or something that actually happened? I say that, because my old geocities site is still up - though I can't update it at all without transferring to their new "service". Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

On 09/03/2011 09:08 PM, ben wrote: "The internet mirrors"? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 09/03/2011 09:27 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Ah. The Wayback Machine (in particular) usually does have images and linked files. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 02/09/11 9:54 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: This risk arrived a long time ago even if you store your data on your own equipment, with "DeActivation" (WinXP, Adobe, etc). Indeed. --Toby

On Sun, 28 Aug 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: "FOLLOWING"?? I don't know Toby's background, but I LEAD in that lunacy! You would be amazed at what people are capable of not knowing! admittedly, it took a millenium to forget entirely how to read Egyption hieroglyphics, saved only by a chance discovery of a multilingual proclamation. Someday, the directions to the loo in Montreal will provide what's needed to recreate English and/or French. Certainly the knowledge of the PRESENT is immortal. And surely that is ALL that we could ever possibly need. If we assume that access to JFIF will never fade, is there any other file spec info that we need? I knew a LOT of people who lost access to data due to the loss of file specs. (NOT JFIF, nor specifically PERQ) But that could never happen NOW. Certainly possible. I just hope that we don't have to keep doing it as much. DAMN! I LIKED the 1960s! but stupidity and short-sightedness no longer rule? You, sir, underestimate the prevalence and power of stupidity! The administration of the college, for example, is losing critical data on a daily basis. Nothing short of defenestration will stop them from losing it. Last month, the amount of comp time that I have accumulated (a year!) had to be recreated from post-it notes on a cubicle wall. such as audio recordings of Janis Joplin. As a matter of fact, . . . All day long, I work around people who literally could not start a fire [DELIBERATELY!] without a Bic lighter. It seems like the Golgafrincham B Ark remains the repository of knowledge. ("But does our target market WANT it (fire) nasally inserted?"; "OK, if you're so smart what color SHOULD it (the wheel) be?") If the college were to be run by people like you, then I might have more hope for mankind. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

But they didn't had the net, backups in DLT and replicability :)

these archives should offer options to folks to send in a drive to get the whole archive thus keeping it alive On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

On 08/28/2011 07:00 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Ok, well that's what we were discussing. The ones which comprise probably less than 1% of the world's digital image data? Seriously? Ok: Any that matter? And if "go obsolete" means "can no longer be used" to you, then you're likely already screwed on a few different levels. Well, suitly profitware is a "buyer beware" sort of situation. You want to eventually lose access to your own images? Be enough of a moron to buy garbage like that. Be enough of a moron to use "image hosting" services. Be enough of a moron to NOT put any thought into the "hey, how pissed off will I be if I lose this image forever?" question. Are people like that really worth worrying about? For you, maybe. For me? I'm just not that patient a person. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/28/2011 05:56 PM, Gene Buckle wrote: I didn't even know what "TL;DR" meant, so I ignored it. Abbreviating for the sake of abbreviating is childish. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 28/08/11 5:56 PM, Gene Buckle wrote: Um, no, it doesn't mean that at all. It means I decided to add a pr?cis. Also note that I added it _at the bottom_, after the long version of _my own argument_. It's not clear how I would try to make a point about my own "intellectual laziness" by using TL;DR. Well, since *I* was making the point in long form, above the aforementioned pr?cis, what you wrote doesn't make any sense. --Toby

http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/ I am curious - what is not documented? -- Will

On 08/28/2011 06:52 PM, Toby Thain wrote: That seriously sucks (Adobe's documentation); the open-source community is surely glad for your efforts. Well, the fools that use that kind of garbage get what they've got coming to them. Microsoft doesn't even TRY to hide their whole vendor lock-in campaign. People who fall for it? Screw 'em. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 08/28/2011 09:32 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Yep, that's it. Boy are the people who fall for THAT crap going to be surprised in a couple of years. MICROS~! has it down to a science. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Jackson" <doug at doughq.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, August 28, 2011 10:52 PM Subject: Re: Difficulties of digital preservation - was Re: eBay... Yikes! (PDP-1 Handbook) The Womens Journal from 1820? They must have some nice articles about how to scrub laundry down by the river. ;) My crappy old college library has some books from the late 1700's so some paper must hold up well if taken care of. Paper made pre 1850 didn't have acid so it will last a long time (they used limestone rollers which took out the acid in the paper pulp).

On 26/08/2011 18:28, Tony Duell wrote: I use both -- more digital than film these days, but I still like my Pentaxes and Mamiya 645s. Most scanners that can handle film include that as part of the basic functionality, though I've come across some misguided software that believes the only form of negative is one with a colour mask. <grin> We had an enlarger at school but my first attempts at making prints at home involved a cast-off 35mm slide projector with some of the lens elements re-ordered :-) -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 23/08/11 10:58 PM, William Donzelli wrote: Undigested, I hope. --T

In article <CANij+dfiBTxPuKVhgpQgbsbsHC_KBfh37OtSeq_Xm7Xjo1QqEQ at mail.gmail.com>, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes: The entire thing is also on bitsavers, so you only really need to buy it if you are obsessed with a physical original. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>