How hard would it be to construct a floppy drive with a voice-coil actuator for the heads and a two-channel 10Mhz ADC data capture front-end? I would think that three such drives (one each for 8", 5.25", and 3.5") would be able to read 99.99% of the floppies produced in those sizes (and would also, with proper programming, be better able to deal with bit rot than the drives of yesteryear.
More like "Sky Is Falling" ping. (no offense intended:)
Information (data) has been 'lost' thru eons of history, but somehow scientists and historians have been able to recreate a fairly accurate picture of the past using only some of the smallest parcels of indirct data still in existance ... everything from the geological record, to the development of biology, to the origins of the Universe as we know it, came from these indirect scientific observations. It is doubtful that mere computer data will simply 'disappear' so easily as long as mankind is around to maintain it. There will always be someone around who still has a Timex/Sinclair antique PC sitting in their workshop :)
I managed to recover about a hundred 20 MB Bernoulli cartridges one time. The OS ain't the problem.
PING
Some problems are just too easy.
ping for later.
-PJ
ping
That's why my office only uses microfilm to preserve our old documents. I am a records manager and oversee the microfilming operation in one office in our county courthouse. They tell me that the newer microfilm has a shelf-life of 500 years if stored properly. The technology to read microfilm is so simple and will always be available. We have considered scanning/microfilming, but the equipment is very expensive. I'm hoping that we will be able to do that eventually - it would certainly speed up the process!
We have to be able to dispose of records but I would refuse to throw them out if they were on disk-only. Heck, I have computer games from five years ago that I can't play on my newer computer!
What happens in the not too distant future when the hardware no longer supports a particular version of the Universal Virtual Computer?
Then wont they need to write another UVC to run the original UVC.
But then the hardware will continue to evolve and you will need an ever-increasing string of UVC updates to read each other and ultimately read the files.
This is all very silly.
All we need is a complete list of rules for reading each file type. At any time in the future someone can write a program to read any file for which the rules have been maintained.
In the future when humans all have brain implants or have been replaced by AI robots it will take microseconds to generate the code and run it against the sum of all documents.
CD-ROMs last much shorter than a good quality paper. Hard disks and tapes last even less.
Why don't they just ask the BATFEC and the IRS what to do about it. I'm sure the pasty-faced droids up there have figured out how to store every detail of personal information about every living human on Earth for at least the next 103,487 years with no possibility of escape, oops excuse me I mean data degradation.
The advertisement column is funny and misleading. Parsers for all interesting formats are being easily written and maintained for UNIX systems. OS emulators to be frequently udpated are unnecessary, although many of those are also being written and maintained.
I have wondered about this "digital decay" every time I send off a sound recording to the Library of Congress for copyright registration. Not only will CDs be unreadable and obsolte in the near future (if they aren't already), but I heard that there is a natural depletion that occurs over time of the digital data on the CDs themselves.
Baconian, Websterian, Collierian, call it what you will, encyclopedic efforts are inspired by the very nature that dooms them - the light that eclipses itself.
Maybe "dark ages" are of the same order of "ice ages."
bump