Organization: City University of New York/ University Computer Center
Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 1993 23:06:36 EST
From: Spartacus/CUNY LC NY <LENBC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Newsgroups: rec.photo
Subject: Re: Photo CD
 <92359.000218I18BC@CUNYVM.BITNET> <C0Czyn.H23@athena.cs.uga.edu>

In article <C0Czyn.H23@athena.cs.uga.edu>, fuller@athena.cs.uga.edu (James P. H.
Fuller) says:
>
>    Sure, it *could* be transferred, but what if nobody bothers to transfer
>it until all the devices that can read it are junked?  I happen to have a
>recording of my grandfather's voice that I can't play.  It's a *wire*
>recording.  Right, like a tape recorder only the stuff on the reels is a
>strand of wire.  Dates from early 1940s, I think.  You got anything that
>will read this?  Or consider the contortions I had to go through when I
>recently wanted to get a file from a 140K Apple II disk, circa 1980, onto

Hate to break this to you, but I believe I've seen a PD utility
somewhere in wuarchive that would have allowed you to do this
on a 5 1/4 drive on a PC :-) :-)

I've jotted down your netaddress and when I find this little utility
again I'll UUEncode it and mail it to you.

Was the "wire" recording widely used in 42?
I admit you got me here, I never heard of
such a thing.

>my 486.  Locate ancient Apple, blow off cobwebs, clean and lubricate disk II
>drive (whoopee, it still works!), locate vendor of serial port cards for
>ancient Apple (whoopee, one or two still exist), rig up null modem, ftp
>Apple II kermit and Unix C-kermit from Columbia to my work host, transfer
>both to 486 via zmodem, compile C-kermit for SysV, get Apple kermit *to*
>the Apple *without* a comm program to receive it (a nice trick), get it
>working, dream up a gettydefs entry for 486 serial port to the Apple, start
>Apple kermit, log into Unix from Apple, invoke C-kermit server, shoot file
>over.  It took almost a week of evenings just to teleport this old file
>forward a mere 13 years.
>
>    I'd like very much to play with some of the IMMENSE amount of data that
>has been generated by satellites and other space probes over the years but
>I can't because almost all of it is archived offline on reels of tape that
>nobody is EVER going to bother to transcribe onto more recent media.  It
>might as well never have been collected.
>
>    I've bellowed the following in this forum before:  COMPUTERS ARE NOT A
>SUBSTITUTE FOR BOOKS.                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I agree with this one at least.  I prefer a book next at my bed than
a monitor & keyboard. :)

>if you want to be sure some archive is readable a
>hundred (let alone a thousand) years hence, you better make sure it's written
>on something that's human-readable *without* any doodads or technical infra-
>structure.

okay, here is some food for thought.  Many large libraries are transcribing
books onto digital form.  This takes lot of man hours to do this manually.
Not to speak of the cost.  Yeah I know about OCR, but they aren't perfect.
Do you honestly believe they will abandon all of this work in a few years?
or will they just transfer the data to better mediums?

If clinton sets up the "information highway" I can guarantee you those
electronic books will be indispensable.

>                                                  -- jf
>| James P. H. Fuller, research director        Soil/Water Biology Laboratory |
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