Tim Tyler  wrote in news:c8mdpe$2534$1
{at}darwin.ediacara.org:

> William Morse  wrote or quoted:

>> The people at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 
>> based on an article I read several years ago, tend to prefer stone 
>> tablets as the most viable long term storage medium among the various 
>> technologies used by humans to store information :-)
 
> I believe that's the luddite information ministry you are talking
> about there ;-)
 
> Most other folks have got the hang of the fact that the longevity
> of information is not merely a function of the longevity of the
> medium in which that information is stored - but also depends on
> any copies of the information that are made.

No, their problem is precisely in making copies of the information. They 
are well aware of the necessity of making copies. And they carefully kept 
magnetic tape machines to read the tapes that at the time were the 
"latest and greatest" storage mechanism. The problem as it turns out is 
that the magnetic tapes are very sensitive to the speed at which they 
have been written - so they have to fiddle with the machines, and 
reconstruct parts for them, so that they can in fact make copies onto 
newer media. The article as I recall also mentioned the problem with 
recent paper being high acid (or whatever it is) causing it to fall apart 
easily. And there is of course the "muller's ratchet" effect of making 
copies of copies without spending a lot of time on error correction.

Now obviously the current amount of information being stored will not fit 
on stone tablets. But there is something to be said for sticking with 
standard formats. ASCII code is still with us, after all, and probably 
will be for quite some time. 

Yours,

Bill Morse
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