On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 21:21:03 +0000, Eli the Bearded wrote:

>
> Yeah, but who or what is going to be able to read the disks a decade
> after your death and what is going to understand the binary format of
> the video files in 100 years?
>
There's a little-known but much worse set of preservation issues for
early movies. I only know about it because I was part of a team
developing a film catalog for the Imperial War Museum, which needed to
record physical film information as well as the obvious stuff like title,
location, date, subject, cameraman etc. The tricky studd included:

- film width.
- frame aspect ratio
- sprocket position, spacing and number of rows used
- substrate (what the base material of the film was - several used
  including cellulose nitrate, wich has several failure modes ranging
  from disintegration the spontaneous ignition
- the photosendsitive chemicals used
- monochrome or colour
- if colour, the process used

At the time we did this the big issue was the cellulose nitrate and its
state.

> You are probably preaching to the choir here. I doubt this crowd was
> ever clamoring to create Flash web programs.
>
Its also worth reading Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/
303881/

which was written in 1945 and describes what is effectively hypertext at
a time when there were only two working electronic computer designs in
the world (Colossus and ENIAC).


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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