Lars writes:

> Gavin wrote...
>  >This is a classic recurring problem throughout the history of computing,
>  >especially in business data processing where electronic records must often
>  >be kept for seven years or more (up to something like 20 years in some
>  >heavily regulated businesses I understand).  It's not hard to keep the
>  >media around, but keeping a working tape drive along with a computer that
>  >supports it is quite often nearly impossible or at least outrageously
>  >expensive.
>
>  Which reminds me of a related article in a recent issue of the German(?)
>  magazine GEO (http://www.geo.de ?) that discussed topics like the loss
>  of knowledge and experience over human history. One of the nice thoughts
>  pointed out that cave drawings or thousands-of-years-old writings (Egypt
>  and the like) are still available today whereas state-of-the-art storage
>  media (magnetical, optical, etc) have much shorter lifecycles until they
>  become useless/inaccessible (either due to death-of-media or incompatible
>  technology progress).
>
>  Hmmm. What a strange world, this modern "civilization"...

This is a problem that librarians, historians and archivists have been
talking about seriously now for quite some time now. It's often said that the
American Civil War (1861-1865) was the last truly well documented war, with
everything from general staff commands to individual soldiers' letters home
written carefully on paper and now extensively available in libraries
throughout the world. In contrast, the 1991 Gulf War was almost completely
undocumented. Almost every form of communication was conducted electronically
instanteously, either digitally computer-to-computer, by e-mail or by voice.
As a consequence, almost nothing remains now, only eight years later.

Further, the problem that Gavin & Lars point out with obsoleting formats is
one that has worried digital librarians from the very earliest days of
computer storage. Two representative articles appear at:

     http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/tfadi.challeng.htm
     http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/com/comfin.html

The second article concerns a test program that I had forgotten about to
archive digital information not on some form of magnetic medium under some
specific format but rather onto microfilm in its rendered form, as a image
that can directly viewed, absent any digital format at all.

Wirt Atmar