The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation

[Chuck Guzis]

On 11/20/21 11:06 AM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote:
> On 20/11/2021 18:46, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>> Is there an archive.org mirror? 
> 
> How many of us could afford the disk space? 30PB in 2016 apparently. I
> know that 10 years from now we'll all have PB drives, but right now it
> would be hard. That's 8 years of downloading @ 1Gbps. So I suspect that
> none of us has an archive.org mirror.

I had an interesting dream last night.  I was in the CDC SVLOPS tape
room and I wondered if all those 7-track tapes would fit on a 128GB USB
pen drive.

I suspect that they would, with room to spare.  Probably fit the
collection from ARHOPS on the drive as well.   All of those programmers,
churning away and the sum total winds up on something that you could fit
several of in a shirt pocket.

How do we value data?  All of those programmers spending much of their
lives developing a paltry (by today's standards) versus a script kiddie
churning out a web pages in day that take 100 MB to store.

More to the point:  What is the value of what's being archived?  Is a 4
MB web splash image worth as much as 4 MB of source code?  If not, who
gets to decide on what to keep?

--Chuck