FWIW, the thread on the pen carriage of the Tektronix 4662 plotter (and I assume the 4661, which seems to be mechanically very similar) is identical to that on Rotring pens. Handy.... You can get metal-tip drafting pens for HP plotters too, but I have no idea what sort of ink they contain. Most of them come pre-filled... -tony

Quothe William Donzelli, from writings of Sat, May 15, 2004 at 08:07:51PM -0400: Does any type of archival-quality toner exist? After a few years, the pages from some laser printouts to stick together and some of the toner comes off onto the pages opposite, so this sort of defeats using acid-free paper. One related thought... seeing that toner is available in a magnetic formulation, if a type of that exists that doesn't cause pages to stick together, then, perhaps data, encoded in some way, could be printed out on acid-free paper and retrieved at some later point in time by using a something like an over-sized card-reader or a tape head of some sort that can, after several passes, scan an entire page. -- Copyright (C) 2004 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved | My VAX | an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & www.rddavis.org | runs VMS & | her other creatures, using dogma to justify such 410-744-4900 | doesn't crash!| beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

Couldn't this be dealt with by painting the printed side of the page with a sealant of some kind, a thin shellac or varnish or some such? Maybe print on unsized paper (lack of sizing shouldn't matter for laser printing precisely because toner doesn't soak in the way ink does) and apply the sizing after printing? (I don't know enough about paper sizing to know whether this is a ludicrous suggestion....) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

There's actually an excellent chance, I'd say, that that dialect will be far more similar to today's English than to Maharati or Cantonese or any of the other native Indian or Chinese languages. English is already a lingua franca in parts of the world where you wouldn't expect it - for example, my mother (who spent some years in India) tells that at some pan-Indian event in the middle of last century, everyone spoke English because there was no other interchange language available between the Hindustani-derived speakers from the north and the Devanagri-derived speakers from the south. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I spent six months in Norway a year or two back. When there, I was talking with a Dutch man who had moved there; he was telling me of a talk he'd given to a Norwegian audience (academics all, all competent in English) in which he'd joked that he could give the talk "in the largest language in the world, English as spoken by foreigners, or the smallest language in the world, Norwegian as spoken by foreigners". /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin" <cisin(a)xenosoft.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 3:12 PM Subject: Re: opinions on very long term storage and references from Google search It all comes from who owns the trade markets at the time. For a long time England and then the US controlled the market flow of raw materials and money/finished goods so everybody who wanted to trade had to learn English and then American slang. Since quite a bit of the raw materials and manufacturing is going on in India, Taiwan, and China these days (seen quite a few advertisements years back for people that knew injection molding and could speak fluent mandarin), I figure there will be a shift sooner or later to another language (even if its English with Chinese slang). Once the shift takes place it will probably take 3 generations for a major change, so yea maybe 100 years is a bit optimistic but 150 years is not. Things change rapidly these days, how long was Latin the deFacto standard?

Howzbout: dynamic steganography? In the UK, they are now getting versions of the "gang member initiation/ headlight flashing" urban legend hoax. If you were to embed your data in urban legends, the logevity would be enormous! There are even people who claim that there are hidden messages in the bible.