In rec.photo.digital.slr-systems Peter J E Brunning <peter@brunning47.demon.co.uk> wrote:

That was really to do with the whole thing being proprietary media and
proprietary software and proprietary data formats and a maze of
copyright issues.  Let's imagine for a moment that the whole system
had been open and fully documented.  Do you suppose it would have
required such a heroic effort to transfer the data to a CD-ROM?  (NB:
I'm not blaming any of the developers; that's simply how things were
done back then.  Every computer system used proprietary software and
there were no open standards for multimedia data.)

Andrew.

If its important enough to need to be archived for 300 years then it will be
re copied to a newer format in plenty of time.  Cd is ubiquitous unlike the
laser disc.

*From:* ColinD <nospam@127.0.0.1>
*Date:* Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:27:22 +1200

The BBC have a habit of doing this. A notorious case was when they
decided that some recorded programmes were occupying too much filing
space and just recorded over them.

Years later when the home video market developed they realised just how
much money they had lost by so doing, for instance there are episodes of
Doctor Who that have had to be lovingly reconstructed from still
pictures and some audio tapes ;-)

Why have the university to rebuild it? They could have spoken with a friend
of my... he still got a 12-inch video disk player WORKING... ;-)

This means that they have to dig up all their time capsules every 20 or 30
years or so, and convert all their archival, "burieds" to whatever the
latest format happens to be at the time.....They might as well just keep it
in their living room.....:^)

Unfortunately, "simplistic" is what you had been advocating...

Now that you are thinking about the problem a bit more, hopefully,
you're starting to realize that this retention issue isn't as trivial
as copying forward 5.25" and 3.5" floppies and so forth.

"Data isn't information any more than fifty tons of concrete is a
skyscraper"

-  from "Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information
Highway";
   Clifford Stoll (paperback -  1996), page 194.

True, but irrelevant:  how is today's retainer supposed to know what
data is going to be critically valuable to a relative or historical
researcher xxx years from now?  The problem is that you're not
differentiating between data and information:  we don't know what raw
data we have today that some futurist may want as valueable-to-him
information about how we lived, what things were like, etc.

Take for example, nature photography:  photos from 50+ years ago can
tell us how large the tusks were on elephants in a particular country,
and comparing that to data from today, we can  infer age, sex, climate,
effects of hunting, poaching, etc.  All from one photo that was kept
even though it wasn't a keeper, because in that particular image, there
was something else that was caught in frame that was able to be a
measurement reference (an identifiable vehicle tire, a doorway, etc).

You still need to have a translating application that understands that
format that runs on today's hardware and today's OS.  Since the
hardware and OS are constantly evolving, to maintain this application
is a constant resource drain.

Even if you're highly altruistic and write the translation software
code with each OS update and distribute it for free, what will happen
in 75 years when you're dead and gone?

File format is merely one step in the system.

Regardless of if the format is proprietary or open source, in order to
have the application software maintained to support it, it has to be
broadly adopted, and then remain as a very strong candidate for a very
long period of time so that the application is also maintained for a
very long time.
If we want to say that something like 8bit channel color space written
as a TIFF is "it", then what do we do when 16bit channels start to
appear ... like is currently supported in Photoshop and being adopted
by more and more photographers?

You can't rely on the big software houses to do this for you:  there's
no money in it for them, which is why the current MS-Office won't open
the file I provided below.  Hell, they aren't even interested in making
MS-Word's HTML format compliant with *current* HTML standards!

You have to have ALL pieces of the system survive, not just one or two.
This also applies to film, but film has simply not had the extreme
rate of change that digital has had over the past 20 years.

Ah, but the specific creator application is listed in the file.  It is
after a handful of line breaks.  From there, the researcher is expected
to go RTFM for that creator application.

BTW, I do see that 6 readers have taken a look at this file.  So far,
no one has reported success.

As such, I'll provide a huge useful clue:  it is MS-Powerpoint V2 for
Mac.   Now you know to rename the file to put a .PPT on the end, and
you can start trying to open it in the correct creator application.

Piece of cake....eh, what do you mean it doesn't work?   Gosh, go dig
around on your HD to see if you kept the previous revision of PPT.
Damn, it didn't work either.  Go check to see if there's an even older
revision of Powerpoint over on that dusty old PC in the corner.  sh.t!
For an application still being sold from the biggest software company
in the world, we shouldn't be running into problems like this, don't
you think?

And damn...this file is *ONLY* 15 years old.

Oh, that's useful.  Here's a similarly 'readable' digital photo; go
figure out the formatting:

11110011001011001010101101010001010110101001010100101010110011010000010101001010101010101010101010111100100110101010010100101000010100101100110101010100101001011001111110101101010110101011011101010101010101010101010010101010101111100110101010010100101010100101100110101010100101001011001111110101101010110101011011101010101010101010101011001011001010000101101010001010110101010101001010101100110100000101010010101010101010101010101111100110101010010100101010100101100110101010100101001011001111110101101...etc...

Without formatting knowledge, raw data is pragmatically useless.

-hh

According to  <derek_c@cix.compulink.co.uk>:

    Not always true.  My wife was working for a Government agency
about twelve years ago or so, and had a Mac with the most recent version
of Word on it.  Others in the agency had Windows machines, with similar
vintage Word.  The documents sent via e-mail could not be read on the
other machines at that time.

    No bets whether your current version of Word can handle
documents even from other Windows boxes from twelve years ago, let
alone from Mac boxes.

    And this is all about being able to read older documents, of
which the mere twelve year span is only the tiniest part.

    Now -- the simpler the format, the more likely that it can be
read later.  Nroff/Troff documents from unix systems in the mid 1970s
are still easily read, modified, and formatted/printed on current unix
boxes.  But these documents are in plain text, with manually added macro
calls for Nroff/Troff -- things like:

======================================================================
.ps 8
.vs 10
.ll 6.5i
.lt 6.5i
======================================================================

Which sets the (font) point size to 8, the vertical space between lines
to 10 points, the line length to 6.5 inches (it can be in points or in
many other units), and the length of title lines to be the same.  I'll
avoid most of the other stuff, but it allows excellent control of format
(originally for a phototypesetter), and even includes a macro package
for drawing of line drawings, as well as ones for tables and for
typesetting of math equations.

    The difference between this and Word's format is that it was
widely published, and there are multiple sources of the programs which
did this (in source code format), so it is easy to keep them working on
newer machines.  It gracefully made the transition from phototypesetters
to laser printers for example.

    Word's multiple formats have always been proprietary, as have
Wang's word processing file format.  This means that people can only
guess at how something is supposed to behave -- and is likely to get
sued if they get it right.

    Enjoy,
        DoN.

Parlez vous Rube Goldberg?

http://www.rube-goldberg.com/

And they ask "Daddy, did they have digital cameras when you were little?"

You could probably do this with a CD, too.....that is, make a CD that can be
"burned" into a ceramic disk, and then fused at high temperature so it
becomes virtually indestructible.....Of course, there are cost
considerations.........

The U.S. Army used to issue one that looked a lot like this one. I've
still got one somewhere.

     http://www.cannondirect.com/item791.htm

You could probably read them with a strong enough loupe.