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the main difficulties that people have running software from the 80s (mostly hobbyists, but in the future this could be professional historians; granted it’s an

the main difficulties that people have running software from the 80s (mostly hobbyists, but in the future this could be professional historians; granted it’s an order of magnitude difference but still) is finding, and then getting it off physical media. hardware emulators do a lot of the work. where everything is “upgraded” to modern storage as it is in the internet, this isn’t an issue. thanks to projects like archive.org, we are in one of the best documented, most survivable ages of human civilisation. digital data can be copied as many times as you like without degradation, so it won’t be “ravaged by time” like ancient inks and paints. short of a major worldwide event like a global return to the ages of book burning (though even then there will likely be hobbyists that go against the grain and store TB of data for the future), i can see wikipedia, and huge parts of our current society immaculately preserved. when you have access like that, reading and displaying our ancient formats won’t be that big of an issue for someone who makes it their life’s work to research and write the text “decoding the 21st century facebook”.

bad_user 8y ago
Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as plain paper. There are books that have survived a millennium or more, yet my CDs from 15 years ago no longer work and the CD is almost dead. That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.
- namibj 8y ago
  If you cared, you could have expected that lifetime for the CD-R you talk about. The effect that hit your discs, is not one that hits tape or BD-R (except LTH). It is actually more closely related to Flash, i.e. USB sticks/SSDs/memory cards. The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper. The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light). None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand. Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.

bad_user 8y ago

Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as plain paper. There are books that have survived a millennium or more, yet my CDs from 15 years ago no longer work and the CD is almost dead. That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.

namibj 8y ago
If you cared, you could have expected that lifetime for the CD-R you talk about. The effect that hit your discs, is not one that hits tape or BD-R (except LTH). It is actually more closely related to Flash, i.e. USB sticks/SSDs/memory cards. The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper. The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light). None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand. Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.