Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Memories
ScienceDaily: They [Alex Zettl and colleagues]note that William the Conqueror's Doomsday Book, written on vellum in 1086 AD, has survived 900 years. However, the medium used for a digital version of the book, encoded in 1986, failed within 20 years.
This is for those folks (and that seems most) who can't wait to transfer all their memories to RAM, ROM or to some other digital acronym. All those precious family photos and movies that you've patiently put on tape or disk aren't going to be there all that long. In my old house we found newspapers dated from 1918 that were still mostly perfectly readable. Even with a few nail holes and tears where they were creased didn't keep me from reading about the front line in Europe.
On the other hand, I've noticed some of the CDs that I used to archive some college work on only 10 years ago, have failed. There's no holes, they haven't been stored in temperature extremes or in the weather, but have been neatly stored in CD containers in the dark. Granted, they weren't the special archival quality disks available, but then who does use those?
I have regretted the loss of some early computer programs I wrote. A couple of games to be exact. As late as a few years ago, I did have a cassette with one of them. However, how common is a TRS-80 Model 1 with cassette to read them these days. Five and a quarter inch disks are virtually non-existent these days when once they used to be as common as three-and-a-half inch disks - which themselves are becoming quite scarce.
On the other hand, I have a photo of my grandparents wedding (very early 20th century) that is as sharp as the day it was processed. What about your kid's photos on VHS or DVD? Do you think anyone will be able to see them in twenty years?
