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

[Jerome Hartke <jhartke@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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? 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.

Jerry
Media Sciences, Inc.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
> [mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Don Cox
> Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2006 11:42 AM
> To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] "Forever" is hype (was Re: [ARSCLIST] Why sticky
> shed happened)
> 
> On 02/07/06, Mwcpc6@xxxxxxx wrote:
> > In a message dated 7/1/2006 3:13:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> > tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: I read somewhere that some
> > organization, maybe a government agency, was studying printing binary
> > machine language of certain key digital documents or software and
> > printing on archival paper, the
> > idea being that it would survive a nuclear war and if surviving people
> > could somehow construct a
> > computer and punch this stuff in, they'd be able to recreate the
> > digital content. Might be sci-fi but I'm pretty sure I read it from a
> > reputable news source. This may have been some dot-bomb bs in
> > the 90s, however.
> >
> > -- Tom Fine
> > ******************
> >
> > About 30 years ago the Kodak research laboratory was working on
> > recording digital data on silver halides in gelatin on glass discs.
> > That combination of materials has held up for more than 100 years with
> > reasonable storage conditions. High resolution black and white
> > emulsions hadn't changed much in that time, though "improved"
> > emulsions may be different now. It may have actually been used for
> > some military projects.
> >
> > Mike Csontos
> 
> That would have the advantage over "burned" digital discs of having a
> fixing process to make the record permanent.
> 
> I'm not sure whether you could get the same resolution as on current CDs
> or DVDs, but you might get near it.
> 
> The process would never be popular because of the need for a chemical
> process, but it could find a niche in archiving. For example, record
> companies might like to store their digital recordings in a safer format
> now that the copyright period is so long.
> 
> Regards
> --
> Don Cox
> doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx