[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
More information about the rescue
mailing list