----- Original Message -----
That is exactly my
point. ALL of the material I mentioned should have been, and mostly was,
scrapped simply because there were literally tons of it and scrap metal was
valuable. But if there is no durable medium so that there can be
accidental survival, there will be absolutely no record of the past beyond
that which is part of the official database.
And among the things we lost were any number of original stampers, some
of alternate takes, as well as uncounted
numbers
of shellac records, some of which may have been the last surviving
copies. Add to that the documents forever lost
through
disasters (the only surviving archive of my home-town newspaper
was lost when the library was demolished by a
tornado,
and there is only an incomplete archive of Oshawa newspapers due to a
fire in the early 1950s) and there are areas
of
history which are totally inaccessible to us today? My point is why
repeat these errors, I suppose...
...stevenc
At first, sound vanished as soon as it
stopped reverberating in the air. Then for a hundred years, it could be
locked in physical media that could last forever. Now it is once again being
reduced to transient waves; electrons circulating in cyberspace only as long
as they are kept reflecting from surface to semiconducting surface.
How is this to be managed?
Mike
Csontos