OT: Archiving data/video/movies/photos/oral history

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Sat Jun 3 00:50:02 2000

On Fri, Jun 02, 2000 at 09:28:05PM -0400, William Donzelli wrote:
>I think the CD-Audio (and thus CD-ROM, pretty much) standard will never
>go away completely, simply because it is so entrenched. Ten years from
>now, when technology leaves the 600 some odd megabyte CD in the dust,
>there will be a small, but almost religious, group keeping them alive.

I'm not sure the group will be so small -- 74 minutes is already on the
high side for an album, I really don't think *any* band would be happy
if all their fans expected them to cough up 6 hours of new songs every
couple of years! We can already get much higher data density than what's
possible with CDs, but for regular pop music purposes there's no real
need to improve on CDs. They're physically small enough that they're too
easy to lose (I don't know what the heck the minidisk folks are thinking,
those things look even more likely to roll under a car seat where you'll
never find them), and they hold about as much as would reasonably fit
on an LP or cassette anyway.

Of course, consumers are sheep so I'm sure audio CDs will be flushed in
favor of something else sooner or later, but it will probably be for no
good reason.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Sat Jun 03 2000 - 00:50:02 BST