[rescue] cd-rom rot

Phil Stracchino phils at caerllewys.net
Thu Feb 20 15:14:32 CST 2020


On 2020-02-20 15:51, Robert Toegel wrote:
> There was an article years ago in Scientific American about how permanent
> difference storage media were before you find bit errors appearing.  IIRC,
> it was about two years for floppies and about ten years for CDs.  That one
> lost a lot of bits, lol.  Guess paper tape wins again.


I imagine it's probably rather difficult to find a working punch-tape
reader in 2020, much less a device driver for one for a modern OS.  The
low capacity of paper tape would be a problem too.

Also, remember that while mylar or acid-free paper is still pristine a
few decades later, a lot of cheap paper has deteriorated into mush, and
not all paper tape was archive-quality acid-free paper.  I'd bet that if
you were to go around and gather up and evaluate a large quantity of
random, not-specifically-archived paper tape today, a lot of it would be
damaged or unusable without designing special low-tape-force readers to
handle it without damaging it further.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: +1.603.293.8485
  Mobile:   +1.603.998.6958


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