This topic came up on slashdot a week or two back, and I have been
thinking about it ever since. And it's even on-topic, when asked
a certain way. How resilient are today's storage media? In
particular, is our classic computing data (tape/disk images, scanned
documents, etc.) archived adequately enough that it's going to
survive the next few centuries?
One slashdot poster postulated that some EMR event (possibly the
next magnetic pole reversal, or some sort of solar phenomenon) could
wipe out nearly all of our magnetically stored data. Another user
pointed out that even CD-ROMs expire eventually.
One thing that came to my mind was our venerable friend the paper
tape (an example of why it pays to remember the history of
computing). I think it makes a darn good solution for archiving
data and locking it away in a vault for a few millenia, provided
some research was put into developing a tape paper (or other
material) that would last longer and store data more densely than
our traditional paper tape mechanisms.
Any thoughts?
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss_at_ou.edu
Received on Tue May 15 2001 - 21:47:52 BST