Seen on RISKS-L

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu Mar 7 15:16:58 2002

At 12:56 PM 3/7/2002 +0000, Sellam Ismail wrote:
>It's pretty silly when folks write articles like this and don't bother to
>do even the minimum of research, which would have revealed that there are
>plenty of BBC Micros still in existence. If the writer is referring to
>the video disc player (which would make more sense) then I can believe
>that there may only be a "handful" of complete systems left in existence,
>but this begs the question of why, inspite of them, this makes the
>videodiscs "unreadable".

You'd think the actual problem must be that the discs are
becoming unreadable, or that kind of LD player is hard to find
or maintain, or that there was some custom controller that's
in need of repair. I doubt BBC Micros are rare in the UK.
You'd think an emulator would be created to recreate the gizmo.

Here's a free business idea. I'm sure there's going to
be a market for CD and CD-R recovery ten years from now,
after we've all used our supply of nearly-free CD-R blanks.

Similarly, I wish there was a device for low-level recovery
of 8mm video tapes. I'm lamenting a year or more of tapes
I recorded of my young kids, on a Sony camcorder that
suffered from cheap capacitors that rot over time (leaving
a fishy smell) and cause the recorder to fail slowly,
as well as loosening tape guides. Playback of the most
recently recorded stuff worked, and I never bothered to
check tapes on a second deck, or check older material.
It drifted out of sync.

In both cases, you'll need a device that deals with error
recovery at lower-level bit streams, or digitizing and
reinterpretation of what's there - a sync regenerator,
if you will. Like Jerome Fine's digitizing 9-track.

- John
Received on Thu Mar 07 2002 - 15:16:58 GMT