On Sun, February 27, 2011 11:37 pm, Robert Patterson wrote: > The computer industry is fickle towards users and extremely > short-lived compared to humans, without even thinking about the kind of > archival persistence we are accustomed to in the music world.
Yes. I remember how, about ten years ago when the archiving issue got serious, the industry leaders told us not to worry -- emulation would make old hardware and software issues insignificant. Whether it was old data formats, old websites, or even old software and operating systems, there would be emulators broadly available to do whatever was needed. I started working with computers 34 years ago, and I've watched major projects of mine slowly vanish because the old hardware finally failed (right down to old EPROMs self-erasing and old floppies losing coercivity with time). No emulators had appeared in time. Archiving may still happen, but I wouldn't count on it. Volunteers have written 8-bit emulators (though they are unable to handle even the common hardware interfaces, such as 5-inch floppies or parallel printers much less 'niche' devices most at risk). But I'm not so sure that, with the extended copyright issues, we'll see emulations of obsoleted PC and Mac operating systems (nor hardware to work with them) in time to recover what we're beginning to lose. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
