Re: [ARSCLIST] "Forever" is hype (was Re: [ARSCLIST] Why sticky shed happened)

[Don Cox <doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/07/06, Jerome Hartke wrote:
> DigiPress of France offered a service several decades ago where they
> made archival grade glass CD's using an sputtered metal layer with the
> digital information etched into it. We tested their quality and it was
> very good. User response was insufficient to support their business,
> so they closed. I see no reason why a revival in some form would be
> supported.
> 
> Regarding printing binary representations of documents, why not just
> print the document itself? 

Any illustrations could be scanned from the originals and stored more
accurately as digital information.

> Even then, the bulk would severely limit
> the amount of information that could be preserved. As an aside, ASCII
> equivalents of the English alphabet require seven bits, while USC-2
> equivalents of the multilingual character set require sixteen bits.
> Binary requires more space on paper than the graphic representation of
> the character.

I would say less. If you use UTF-8, the great majority of characters in
a European-language text are one byte. That could be printed in one
square mm. Even if you double this to allow for error correction, that
is equivalent to very small type - and normal type has no error
correction.

However, this is all hypothetical. It isn't going to happen.

I see that the British government has no plans for the preservation of
its documents, which are probably mostly Word files.

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx