At 17:48 6/27/02, Jim Brokaw wrote:
A careful digital scan, capturing as much of the data off the film as is
possible, then preserved in a recoverable format, can be a much longer-lived
archive.
Note: This is *not* "picking on" Jim Brokaw but discusses the greater
issues of digital computing and data storage, a very real and serious
problem studied by a former employer and a major topic in my graduate
studies (which were *not* computer science).
I won't discuss the medium on which CD's are recorded. That's another
issue entirely, but I seriously doubt the "common" CD has an archival life
as long as properly stored transparencies or B/W negatives (color negatives
are another problem).
IMHO digitizing film imagery for long term archival (many decades) is is a
myth being served up by the market-droids of the digital hardware and
software manufacturers. Imagine having digital files stored on 8" floppy
disks. How are you going to read them? Even if you *could* find an 8"
floppy drive, where is the machine running CP/M to read the file directory
and allocation table? Then there's the file format itself, and the
lifespan of the magnetic medium and its base material (more accurately, how
the magnetic material adheres to the base material). All this occurred in
less than **half** the age of my father's Kodachromes. Heaven forbid you
have something on digital tape!!
We did a study about at the aerospace company I worked for in California
about the "half-life" of digital computer technology. It's approximately
seven years. Why? Because our customer(s) wanted to buy systems that
would be usable and supportable for several decades. The sad story is
digital computing platforms cannot be easily supported after about 5-10
years. If the digital computer industry (hardware *and* software) had
their way, it would be shorter yet, to **force** buying new hardware and
software (from them) and maintain a constant revenue stream. Think of it
like a subscription that requires renewal about every 5 years or so. How
long ago was it that the average PC was a Pentium processor under 200 MHz
running Windows 3.1 or perhaps Windows '95? If you wrote something in
WordStar Word Perfect ten years ago, how would you access it now? If you
did some financial studies or pro forma balance sheets in Lotus 1-2-3 to go
with it, how would you access it now? Do you even have a disk drive that
can read the disks on which it was stored (if it was 5.25 inch
mini-floppys, you're sunk).
IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT "CD" TECHNOLOGY:
CD technology is sunsetting. It's being replaced by DVD. All those who
have been busy archiving gigabytes of data on CD's, get ready to copy it
all from CD to DVD in the not too distant future. Keep the CD's well
organized. Finding a CD somehow got missed a few years after all the
legacy data conversion is accomplished and can no longer be performed could
be heart-breaking. The larger the data archive, the more arduous legacy
data conversion becomes. This is a Big Deal for major corporations, and
they have an IS department with the trained personnel and tools for it!
I can hold a CD up to the light and wonder at all the pretty rainbow
reflections that scatter from its surface, but I cannot read a single file
on it with my eyes. I can hold a Kodachrome transparency up to the light
and wonder at how well my father was able to estimate exposures and compose
his photographs over 50 years ago.
-- John
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