> We have considered the problem of 100 year old records availability Bill Gates was asked about this when he addressed an NHS Chief Executives' Forum in December. He gave a totally clueless answer which related to the physical longevity of digital media such as CDs. Of course, the questioner was concerned about the deliberate obsolescing of proprietary formats.
To my mind, the problem of informational longevity is not technical, but social and epidemiological. Basically, as long as the information that is precious to you is held in a form that lots of other people also hold information that is precious to them, you will be OK. For example, in UK general practice, it's probably safer to have your data in EMIS (the market leader) than GPCare (a small handrolled academic solution in VisualBasic). It's going to be worth someone's while to write export filters for EMIS (~1000 practices); it's less certain that will happen for GPCare (~10 practices). (I'm not sure that: > the networked microfilm machine which > photographs the data unto the microfilm. [Huh? As bar codes? Dots and dashes? 1s and 0s? ASCII?] falls in to this category.) When making these decisions, you need to try to predict social trends with questions like, "How many have Kodak sold anyway?" and "Is it the industry standard?" FWIW I predict ASCII, and machines that can read it easily, will be around in 100 years. Does the info you want to store boil down to ASCII? It seems a shame to throw the benefits of digital information away (reproducibility, compactness, searchability) almost as soon as you have attained them. D. -- Douglas Carnall tel:+44 (0)20 7241 1255 fax:08700 557879 mob:07900 212881 http://www.carnall.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
