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The Digital Dark Age
zygan wrote to mention a Fairfax Digital article about the possibility of a digital dark age, as a result of the increasingly short-term lifespan of digital storage. From the article: "It is 2045, he suggests, and his grandchildren are exploring the attic of his old house when they come across a CD-ROM and a letter, which explains that the disk contains a document that provides directions to obtaining the family fortune. The children are excited. 'But they've never seen a CD before - except in old movies - and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?'"
perhaps the same way I would read a wax cylinder today
i nder.html
visit a specialist
a good place to start would be here :
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/wtmcyl
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
as the CD probably couldn't be read regardless. CDs do not last forever. http://www.warehousephoto.com/How_Permanent_is_you r_CD-R.htm In fact many will be unreadable in as little as 2 years. If you want to archive, print it with good ink on acid free archival paper.
I'd think bmp would be preferable to jpg. bmp is to images what .txt is to text (and while ASCII is arbitrary, it's a single substitution cypher, and therefore easily crackable) -- the simplest, uncompressed format. I've written 1-bit (black and white) bitmaps by hand. I couldn't ever hope to do the same in jpeg.
I have heard the same for photographs. Today's photographic paper isn't the same as older stuff, with less silver, and it tends to fade quicker. While we can rely on 100 year old photographs, our decendents may not. Most paper nowdays is relatively acidic as well, so it breaks down faster with any exposure. This would mean books as well. While there is good paper that is better than the old stuff, most is made to be cheap, not high quality.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!