In article <00db01c26897$1e60b580$dc169fd4@johns>, John G Hitchcock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
A bit OT ... yet a couple of comments :-) >It you want to amaze a child used to playing on a games console, try telling >them that computer games used to come on cassette tapes. In 1982, proud >owners of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (which boasted a stunning 16K - that's >kilobytes - of memory in its basic configuration) would connect the audio >output of the cassette recorder to the Spectrum's input; the program, >recorded as a series of high and low tones, was then translated into data >and loaded into memory. If anyone is a 'Spectrum' collector then a batch of books, tapes, etc, will be available at the London Quanta meeting in November. These were passed on by Roy Wood. >Getting a handle on the preservation of this digital data is the purpose of >the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), which last week announced an >action plan "to ensure that the digital information we are producing is not >lost to current and future generations". > >At the launch of the project, which has backing from 19 UK organisations - >including the Public Record Office (PRO), the Joint Information Systems >Committee of the Higher and Farther Education Funding Councils (JISC), the >British Library and the University of London - a pertinent example was >mentioned: the BBC Domesday Project. This was a multimedia project that >eventually produced a pair of interactive video discs, made by the BBC, to >celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book. More than a >million people contributed in some way, providing offerings from schools and >researchers. My school was one of the contributers to this project ... and had photos of the local High Street, etc, on the Domesday Disc. Problem was it required a special player, made by Phillips, which didn't become popular - the discs were the size of LP records. So I guess few will ever be able to read this electronic Domesday in future ! >These were then stored on the discs and could be viewed using a BBC Acorn >computer. It was claimed that it would take you more than seven years to >look at everything on the discs. However, by the time you had looked at all >that content, the computers would long since have become obsolete. And >that's pretty much what has happened: "As a multimedia resource and >interactive learning tool it was unsurpassed," said Loyd Grossman, chairman >of the DPC. "Yet despite those achievements, the problems of hardware and >software dependence have now rendered the system obsolete. With few working >examples left, the information on this incredible historical object will >soon disappear forever." I can attest to that ! >Items are sent to the PRO when they are at least 30 years old; most are >weeded out over time, and regarded as not worth keeping as a matter of >historical record about the working of government, and so the PRO only >receives 3 per cent of the paperwork that was generated in any department. >It was even so for 2001 - covering the period stretching back to 1971 and >(for more secret documents) even earlier, which generated a stack of paper >that covers the equivalent of 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles) of shelf space. And >in a few years, there will be more and more computer tapes and disks. The >question is, how should they be preserved? And what is the best medium and >encoding format to make them available over the long term, perhaps hundreds >of years? I expect pen and paper,and newsprints, etc, will still be around for a long time to come. -- Malcolm Cadman
