Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Nov 2008 09:13 UTC, submitted by irbis
What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer's hard drive? The concern for archivists and information scientists is that, with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility.
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Member since:
2008-06-18
maybe the problem is solved. Let's take a file from several generations ago: say a book report originally done on a 5.25 floppy with a Commodore 64 or Apple2c computer.
My old floppies actually still work and are even writable still, so the argument that the medium isn't trustworthy doesn't fly here. So let's assume that I no longer have the machines nor a hard-copy print out to just type it all over again like a scribe back in the day. With this scenario how would a person go about getting that data from the 5.25 floppy and being able to either use it again or at least view it so it can be printed or exported etc?
Off the top of my head I think one would need:
a) a 5.25 floppy drive
b) software to read it which would probably be in PASCAL I think those machines used back then.
c) would an emulator work? I think those only use ROM files so they are kind of "dumb" for lack of a better term.
I think that is a realistic example for this general problem we are discussing.