🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan11.033301.17779@galaxia.network23.com> dave@galaxia.network23.com (David H. Brierley) writes:
>As part of my church's 100th year celebration, we opened up the
>cornerstone of the church and now are preparing to replace the time
>capsule that was left for us by the original builders with a time
>capsule of our own.  Rather than leaving a lot of paper documents which
>would decay fairly quickly, it was suggested that we leave some form of
>computer media.  The rectors first thought was to leave a couple of
>floppy disks but I pointed out the fact that the magnetic information on
>the disk would probably decay sooner than a paper document would.  It
>then occurred to me that writable optical disks and CD roms have a much
>longer life expectancy.

[...]

>We realize that there is a possibility that the disk will not be readable
>when it is retrieved in the future, both due to disk failure and to the
>fact that the disk format will likely be ancient, but we are willing to
>take that risk.

    Good heavens! Whats wrong with microfilm? It's much cheaper then
a one-off CD ROM (in the low thousand $ range), has a proven
longevity, and is much easier to read.

     Even better and cheaper (provided you don't intend to store
thousands of pages of stuff), photocopy or laserprint documents onto
acid-free, archival standard paper, put it into acid free covers, and
seal it in a dry container (use an argon or nitrogen atmosphere if you
want to get fancy). Even without special protection against
temperature changes, that ought to be good for a thousand years.

     The real durability of CD ROMs is very questionable: They
deteriorate rapidly once air gets to the aluminum - PERHAPS the gold
ones are better in this respect, but no one really knows yet. The
other "optical" technologies are likely to be even more ephemeral -
some of the read/write optical disks also have a magnetic component.

     Beyond this is the loss of machines and software.  I heard
several years ago about a researcher who wanted to look at some of the
original 1960 census data. This was recorded on 6-track tapes, and
after months of searching, he found two machines that could read it -
one in Japan, and the other in the Smithsonian.

     I'd lay long odds against any current machine data format being
easily readable in 2023, let alone 2093. I myself have some 8"
floppies with effectively unrecoverable data (fortunately not very
important) from the late seventies.

						Peter Trei