[inforoots] "The digital Dark Age" (Sydney Morning Herald)

[Mike Albaugh]

Texx wrote:

> Our own musuem collection contains boxes of mag tape that we havent been able 
> to read yet.  Alas Im sure some of it has succumed to bit rit.

 Perhaps, depenidng on storage conditions, but the older stuff
was 200 or 556 BPI, and as long as its on "decent" media,
it may surprise you. Paul Pierce was able to recover all but
a few blocks of a tape with the sources for a CDC 3600
Timesharing O.S. from a 7-track tape for me, about two years
back. And since then, he has revamped and improved his
read electronics.

> As it turns out, the most resilient and longlived archiving media is:
> (GET THIS and cue the drum roll please)
> 
> PUNCHED MYLAR TAPE.  It outlasts everything else.
> 
> Funny how old technology seems to outlast the new fangles stuff, isnt it?

 But again, that's the _easy_ part, almost. A typcial email by even
a blowhard such as myself is only 2,,4K, or say no more than
35 feet. But if I were a "modern" sort who used HTML-mail and
graphic signature, it would be more like 4..8K, and if I were
a manager, and used Word, it would be (easily) 60K. 500feet.
_and_ unreadable by a Word more than two revs newer than
the one that wrote it. :-)

If it weren't for that "bloat factor", it might be cool to
get Kyocera interested in "Cuneiform 2K", read with a
needle.They do _amazing_ multi-layer ceramic packages
with vias and all. Could probably put 4K "pits" per square
inch, and we could probably get at least two bits per bit,
with readily understandable readers producible by folks
who had regained the mechanical skills of about 1800.

I stongly suspect there are no mylar tapes within a
couple orders of magnitude of the age of the newest
genuine cuneiform tablet we have. :-)

  Mike