William Robb wrote: > For the great unwashed, it is also a matter of complacency > and lack of > interest. > I predict that an entire generation of pictures will mostly > be lost because > the computer is not archiving friendly.
For once, my sympathies lie with the public. Operating systems over the years have made it become simpler and simpler to operate computers and yet to keep up with technology, you need a more powerful machine, which folk know less and less about. As folk update hardware, their need to 'know how' to work it becomes more unnecessary, along with the fact that the storage methods used on previous machines aren't brought forward or are superseded on the new. I know lots of people with floppy discs, zip discs or CDs with their pictures stored on them, which their new machines can't access. How do you expect the non-technical average user to buy into a new system and method of storage, when every few years it's been superseded and been made obsolete? You used to take film pictures and put the results in the drawer. Now you have much more convenience on taking and sharing those images, but for most people long term storage is an unknown - even when they try. Malcolm