dead media, preservation and HARDWARE COMPANIES
PLEASE VISIT THE EDUCTION VENDOR DIRECTORY
Dead Media Necronauts - Dead Media Project is a loose networking effort by independent scholars to establish a common source of public knowledge. It's a kind of Invisible College of archeological media illuminati. ex: DEAD PRELITERATE MEDIA, DEAD SOUND-TRANSFER NETWORKS, SMOKE DISPLAYS AND NETWORKS, DEAD PHYSICAL TRANSFER NETWORKS
CRYPTO «Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve...»
Anybody remember floppy disks?
You see them sometimes at garage sales or thrift stores, lying
forlornly in a cardboard box, the music of some pop-music star of
the early 1970s locked within their plastic cases, never to be
heard -- unless someone can track down an eight-track-tape
machine.
Perhaps that same scene will be played out 35 years from now with
boxes of digital cameras going begging because no one has a way of
unlocking the photos embedded on compact flash cards or memory
sticks or whatever the obsolete media storage technology of the
era turns out to be.
That the tunes of Three Dog Night or fuzzy photos of a
5-year-old's birthday party are rendered inaccessible by the march
of technology represents no great societal tragedy or loss to
posterity.
But what if the information was something more significant -- such
as government or corporate records, personal financial or health
data, documents of historic significance?
Paper-based records we can preserve and read even if they're
centuries old. Presuming that we handle them carefully and still
know how to read, we'll be able to read them hundreds of years
from now. Jerry Handfield, the state's archivist, recently
returned from a trip to Argentina where he viewed paper records
dating from 1500.
What about records that depend on a specific device or piece of
hardware to read them?
"The digital information we create is in danger of disappearing on
a major scale," says a release from the Digital Futures Alliance,
a consortium established last year by University of Washington
Libraries.
"We think about that a lot," says Feliks Banel, deputy director of
Seattle's Museum of History and Industry. Institutions such as
MOHAI not only have to sort and store vast amounts of archival
material, they have to think about how to access the information,
even when the specific technology is no longer in wide use.
"We're getting video formats donated to us that we have to go to a
studio to get transferred," says Banel, who has hunted down such
devices as an eight-track player (located at Goodwill) and a
player for 16-inch transcription discs of recordings of 1940s
radio broadcasts.
In some fields of interest, enthusiasts are doing the job of
advancing the material to whatever is the current format. Banel
notes that many "Golden Age" radio shows, having been available on
records and then cassette tapes, are now available in the MP3
format.
But with so much material on formats that have a much shorter
lifespan, there's a danger that material may be lost. Says Banel,
"I don't know anyone who could play floppy disks."
Actually, there is someone who could. The state archivist's office
has been compiling, at its facility in Cheney, a library of
hardware, software and manuals. Handfield says the collection
includes such early-PC-era relics as Commodore 64s, Kaypros and
Apple Lisas, all kept in anticipation of the day, he says, when
someone finds an 8-inch floppy disk (yes, there were such things)
"and says, 'What's this?'"
The library also makes sense because Washington has several
thousand governmental units and, as Handfield notes, "There's no
mandate they use the same equipment."
Accessibility is not the only issue with new, old and
soon-to-be-obsolete information-storage formats. There's also an
issue of whether, even if you have the equipment to read it,
anything useful will be left on what you're trying to read. Paper
can decay, photographs fade; digital media can be even less
permanent. (CDs, for example, are considered unstable. "We don't
keep CDs as archival media," Handfield says.)
If the issue isn't yet a big concern for many individuals or
businesses, at least some people are thinking about the problem.
The Digital Futures Alliance includes as charter partners such
heavyweights as Microsoft, Amgen and RealNetworks and has set up
working groups to tackle specific issues including what to keep
and how.
Whatever answers the alliance and others come up with, sooner
would be preferable. If new formats appear as rapidly as they have
been, and obsolete formats prove to be as unstable as forecast,
and the flood of data stored digitally continues unabated -- and
all of those are quite likely -- a lot of people are going to be
discovering very soon they have a problem they didn't expect to
have.
And when they make that discovery, they'd probably like some
better method for data retrieval than holding an eight-track tape
up to the ear in hopes of hearing something, or holding a computer
floppy up to a bright light in hopes of reading something on it.
Twenty five years of the IBM PC
The IBM PC made communication history
Computer firm IBM made technological history on August 12, 1981
with the announcement of a personal computer - the IBM 5150.
Costing $1,565, the 5150 had just 16K of memory - scarcely more
than a couple of modest e-mails worth.