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It was probably named after Pippin as in "Merry & Pippin."

Speaking of automated networks for distributing physical goods: Pneumatic tubes used to be "the future," and were actually pretty popular for a while. Some buildings were wired pretty well with pneumatic tubes, and there was talk about running them to every house and receiving and sending your mail, etc. through them. This never happened, and I believe the main reason it didn't was that, at the time, there was no such thing as automated switching that could work quickly enough. The pneumatic tube systems that were installed mostly had a point-to-point continuous tube for each route. For a bigger, more complex system where they couldn't do a point-to-point separate tube for every point, the switching station was a big hub where all the tubes thunked out and operators read a written label for where each one was going and went and stuck it into the right tube.

Of course, these days, all the technology for a managed packet switching network is dirt cheap. (Well, except for the pneumatic physical switches, but that's just an engineering problem.) These days, a pneumatic tube network could just have something like an RFID in each tube that gets the destination written to it, which gets read well before each switch as it flies along, so the switch is flipped before it arrives, and the packages never need to slow down. We really could do an automated system for the delivery of physical goods, and receive and send mail, order stuff from the convenience store, etc. I'm sure if a network like this existed in big cities, all sorts of businesses would build connected hubs, so you could order small stuff from Amazon and Best Buy and Walmart, etc., online and have it show up in your tube box in an hour or whatever.

It would probably also have the side benefit that a lot more small electronics would be shock rated. And a whole lot of goods would be in (presumably round) packaging that just fit in a tube. I imagine milk and cereal would all come in cylindrical packaging like a tube of quaker oats. But alas, it's one of those directions we just didn't take. An automated physical delivery system is just one of many places where maybe a lot of money on R&D and infrastructure could have gone that way, but it just never quite fell into place and worked out. It could be cool, though. Just because it's pneumatic, it doesn't have to end up like Brazil.

I do this (run a business that archives people's pictures indefinitely), but I can't guarantee my company will be around in 100 years. If it is, that still brings up the question, how do your grandchildren know to come to me to get your pictures?

There are media that should last that long if stored properly. There is always the possibility of unexpected reciprocity failure in testing, or a type of degradation of which we are not yet aware and didn't test for, but experts, including those at the Library of Congress and other notable institutions, seem to think that MDM-A Gold CD's will last over 100 years. Of course, this leaves the problems of
1. Will anything be able to read CD's?
and
2. Will anything be able to view JPEG's?

I would guess that the answer to these is "yes." JPEG's are so ubiquitous and maintaining support for them on computers is so easy, I suspect they'll remain readable. Maybe the equivalent to the average web-browser or whatever won't read them then, but the 2106 equivalent to GraphicConverter will.

Player availability is more ify. CD's have already been around for 24 years, and the next generation of players (HD-DVD and Blue-Ray) will still play the original CD's. As long as small spinning disks are a popular layout for data storage, the costs of including compatibility for CD's is tiny and will keep shrinking. Meanwhile, CD's are incredibly popular. So I think we've got a lot of backwards compatibility left. When we moved from wax cylinders to flat records to tapes to CD's, maintaining backwards compatibility was essentially impossible; or at least, it was no easier than making two separate machines and gluing them together. But today everything runs of general-purpose micro processors, so maintaining backwards compatibility gets easier and easier. Add to that the fact that if you have a shellac 78-RPM record from the 1890's that you can still easily buy a brand-new record player that will play it, about 120 years later. So again, if not common, I think there will be machines available that play CD's. Or at the very least, labs you can take them to for transfer, like 8mm home movies.

But I think the best method is simply to have someone keep track of them. Keep them on your computer. Keep your computer backed-up at home. Then get some kind of off-site backup, like online backup, mailing good backup disks to a relative or putting them in a safety-deposit box, or hiring me :) With constant stewardship, it doesn't matter if you media is long-lived. If your primary fails, you replace your primary and restore from backup. If your house burns down, you buy a new computer, anew backup drive, and restore from your most recent off-site backup. Nothing- the devices, the formats, the readers- have to be time-proof.

If you keep track of your photos in something like Picassa, iPhoto, etc, you'll notice if they stop working, and can get a converter and move them to a modern format conveniently, when the changeover happens and it's easy to do. Keep them organized and delete the bad ones, so they're worth looking through. And when you get older, hand them down to someone younger to care for. Maybe a younger generation won't care and will lose them all, but whether you've got them on archival gold disks, held by a professional backup company, or on your own hard drive, if your family doesn't care, it won't matter. No technology will surpass basic stewardship within your family. However, the incorrect technology could destroy them all, so do some research and take some precautions.

Not to worry, Gromit - just a bit of harmless brain alteration.

Having just gone through several boxes of poorly preserved family photographs, most which have turned to brittle shavings, I'll take the digital route, thank you. Information on the deterioration of prints here, if you'd like. Even if mom and dad isn't, there are people who will for them.

Hmm, let's see.

- A good inkjet print, like with Epson's Ultrachromes, will last as long or longer.
- Good inkjets now produce sharper prints than any photographic process except the laser exposures of the Durst Lambda. The newest generation or the next may surpass even it. Oh, and good luck finding a local lab with one of those anyway.
- With an ICC-based Color Management system, you can get more accurate color from your digital files on an inkjet than you can with any traditional photographic print.
- With newer printers like the Epson R-800, you can get wider color-gamut prints than any photographic process.
- You could do all of this at home, anytime you like, without going anywhere. If you want to touch-up the print and redo it, you don't have to drive home to your computer and back.
- I don't have time to look this up for other printers, but the marginal cost of a 4 x 6 print with Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper and Ultrachrome inks on a desktop Epson printer is $0.31. Buy third party inks and papers, and I bet you can get it down to under $0.20.

Need more reasons? If you make many prints to amortize the cost of the printer, and are comfortable with the technology, is there any reason NOT to make your prints at home?



/unbiased information

Incidentally, this is where I throw in a shameless plug. If you want high quality, and maybe additional services that are hard to do yourself like making hardbound photo albums, and photo websites, and archiving, but you don't want to buy your own equipment and figure it all out yourself, try The Family Reserve.

Disclaimer- I am very much affiliated with them.

http://www.familyreserve.com/index.html They do some solid work. Really a one-stop-shop for all your photo needs. I was impressed when I saw some samples of the corrections and restorations The Family Reserve can do. They can archive, print, and backup photos to a secure data center. Just drop off a box, tell them what you want, and it gets done. Consider myself a photo geek as I've done B&W developing since I was 6 and my newest camera is a Sony Cybershot 5MP. My friends and family trust me and I've sent all of them to the Family Reserve. - Heck, if you want to get rid of an ex boyfirend or girlfirend from a great photo, they can do that too!

IMHO it is a somewhat bogus article, because it incorrectly assumes that the previous problem, the one of reataining documents from the past into the present, is the same as the next problem, the one of preserving documents from the present into the future. Those are in fact quite different problems and solutions to one do not apply to the other.

In particular:

1- The problem with carrying along your data when you upgrade to a new computer no longer really exists. If you stored copies of your writings on a TRS-80 I tape cartridge how did you tranfer that to 5 1/4 floppy when you upgraded to a C-64 with a 5150 floppy drive? You could not. What do you do with Mac HFS Syquest cartridges when you upgraded to an 386 Linux box with Zip drives? Storage formats were ideosyncratic but are not now. There are now popular mediums of data exchange between all platforms, not to mention that everthing is networked. Futhermore, the rate of growth in hard drive storage capacity now more than doubles every format generation, so there is usually plenty of room on your new hard drive for all your old files from that old drive. So- Data transfer to new computers: problem in the past, not a problem for the future.

2. Some photographic hardcopy has lasted, so the article suggests using that. However, as others here have already pointed out, longevity depends on the photographic process, and hardcopy from inkjet printers is not the same thing as photographic prints. So: hardcopy image storage: retained images for decades in the past, may not in the future .

3. Preserving image data in an analog format worked in the past because cameras were invented relativly recently and came into widespread use within living memory. But the future of photography will be longer than the history of photography. A preservation method good for 100 years might be useless for 1000 years. In particular, copy fidelity for analog data makes it almoust useless for millenial storage. Digital storage has perfect copy fidelity. So- Analog image storage: worked for all of photographic history in the past, will not work for all of photographic history into the future.

4. In the past, for each "original" that you wanted to exist into the future, you had to perserve one original from the past. With analog Mona Lisa, we have one copy now because we saved one from the past. But with digital copies, for any number of "originals" that you want in the future, you only need to preserve a constant number of copies, one, from the past. With digital Mona Lisa, we could have a million copies in the futrure becasue we preserve one from the present. So- original work: required multiple analog originals in the past, requires a single digital original in the future.

5. The cost of redundancy was high in the past and is low now. I can churn out multiple digital copies at home now real cheap and they take up little space. Analog photo copies were hard to make and took up lots of space.

The upshot is, despite what worked best in the past, the rules have changed. The only way to preserve your photos with perfect fidelity for unlimited time into the future is to get your photos into digital format ASAP on redundant media which you regenerate periodically by transfering to fresh media.

(shameless commercial plug) I have friend in the business of digitizing and restoring analog prints. He will start with your decaying analog photos and give you both digital copies and prints with Epson archival-quality paper and inks which, according to Epson, are good for decades. So if you are uncertain about the the digital format/ analog print issue, you can do both.

No kidding. A trivial web search turns up these guys:

http://www.familyreserve.com/

Who appear to be a small outfit doing full digitization and restoration of old prints, as well as lifetime digital archiving. Depending on pricing it's that last point that would matter to me. I'm not going to endorse a vendor or anything but getting a service which does lifetime offsite digital backup of an entire photo collection sounds like a damn fine idea to me. If the house burns down, you can still get prints, you know? I guess the digital revolution also means you can get re-albumization, restoration, and all the rest out of slides and prints, but I kind of like the show-your-great-great-great-grandkids how (not)cool you were aspect too.

They archive your digital pictures on redundant hard drives and burn gold archival CD's that are stored off-premises.

They also make top quality archival prints and hard-bound albums.

And they scan your existing photos, and can retouch and restore them.

Big Disclaimer! This is my company! So I'm biased. But photographic preservation and archiving is my business, so if that's what you want, please take a look at all we can do!