BillNoll@aol.com
Date: 04/08/00-08:59:51 PM Z
In a message dated 4/8/00 10:21:31 PM, dickburk@ix.netcom.com writes:
<< To take this seriously, the advantage of old fashioned technology like
movies is that you really don't need any special equipment to see what is
on the film. Maybe a magnifying glass.
Mechanisms to show movies, viewers or projectors, are fairly simple. If
one was seriously intending to leave something for the far future the idea
would be to include either a viewer of some sort or plans for making one.
If a digital record was left, magnetic or optical, it would require
having a much larger body of technology available to the ultimate viewer.
I think the problem of archiving digital material is a very real one and
not likely to be solved in any satisfactory way until computer technology
reaches a more advanced level, maybe very much advanced, from where it is now.
Even though we think of computers as very advanced stuff the very fact
that development continues at a rapid pace suggests we are still in the
pioneering period. I suspect that in ten or twenty years we will condsider
the computers we use now very crude stuff.>>
Richard,
That's an interesting comment. There's a school of thought which predicts
that future historians may know more about life in the Renaissance, than our
present day due to the relatively short shelf life of the technology.
What's really going to throw them is finding gum bichromates and cyanotypes
dated April, 2000. :)
Bill Noll
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