On Thursday, June 27, 2002 at 20:56, John A. Lind <olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote re "Re: [OM] Re: archive slide scannin" saying:
> 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).
Doubt what you want, but good CD plastic, properly stored, has a two
century life. It is inherently more stable chemically than film, especially
colour, negative or positive.
> 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!!
Yep.
> 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).
That's still all available, even the 8" floppies. My Word 97 can open Lotus
1-2-3 and Wordstar files. Wordstar is mainly text anyways.
> 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!
You should save the software as well as the data.
You may want to keep some hardware too....
The CD format should be popular for another decade or two, and accessible
for another decade past that.
> 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.
That's easy. He discarded his failures -- like we all do.
Tom--
--------- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Olympus-Documentation
--------- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ottawa-photo-clubs
tOM Trottier, ICQ:57647974 http://abacurial.com
758 Albert St, Ottawa ON Canada K1R 7V8
+1 613 860-6633 fax:231-6115 N45.412 W75.714
"The moment one gives close attention to anything,
even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious,
awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself --
Henry Miller, 1891-1980
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