In 1975 I was working for Aetna Life and Casualty in Hartford, Connecticut.   At that time Aetna was the largest multiline Insurance company and also the largest commercial user of IBM equipment in the "Free World" (which goes to show that with enough qualifiers you can be the best of anything).

In any case we had 500,000 12" magnetic tape drives on site, with another 100,000 in a salt mine for "long term storage".   For those tapes the "retention time" was 9999 years.

Some of the older tapes were marked as seven-track, 128 bits-per-inch.

I asked my boss about trying to read those tapes, and he assured me there was a seven-track tape drive stored along with the tapes, wrapped in bubble wrap.

"Yes", I said, "but where is the computer that can attach to that tape drive, and the OS that can drive the tape controller, and the operator that can boot and run that operating system?"

My boss put his finger to his lips and said 'Shhhhhhhhh".

md

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 1:39 PM Chuck Anderson via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Ignoring the 1000-year hype, I think it all depends on how much the
archivist community adopts the technology.  If archivists decide that
M-DISC is a good solution, then the technology to read them will be
kept alive for that purpose at least long enough to copy the data to a
future format for the next span of time.  If that is 30 or 50 or 100
years, you are already doing much better than other types of digital
media at this storage density.

Luckily M-DISC is just standard Blu-Ray at the physical layer.  All
Blu-Ray drives can read M-DISC media, and all Blu-Ray writable drives
can write to M-DISC media.  The same is not true of writing to M-DISC
DVDs--apparently some DVD-R drives do not have a strong enough laser
to write to M-DISC DVD.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 01:13:04PM -0500, Frank Sweetser wrote:
> Let's be honest - if you gave someone a BlueRay disk *today*, there's a
> pretty good chance they'd have to go hunting around to find some hardware
> to read it.  1,000 years from now, you'd have to:
>
>
>    - Set up the appropriate laser hardware to scan the physical medium at
>    the appropriate resolution, frequency, etc, while not going so high power
>    that you damage the disc.
>    - Translate the physical pits on the disc to a bitstream.
>    - Translate the bitstream as a filesystem data.
>    - Translate the contents of the files (anyone still have a copy of Word
>    95?)
>
> This technology is probably fantastic on a scale of a few decades, so long
> as you're careful about which file formats you pick, but if you're serious
> about centuries or more you'd probably have to stick to something that
> requires no technology to read, like engravings on glass or non-corrosive
> metals.
>
> (For extra fun, just imagine the fun in a few centuries when amateur
> archeologists try to figure out these funny markings that turn out to be QR
> codes
> https://monuments.com/store/headstones-accessories/living-headstones-qr-code
> )
>
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 12:01 PM Tim Keller via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Here's a question... in a 1000 years.. will you even have a drive that
> > could read such a disk?
> > You'd need to store details manuals with how to construct a drive and the
> > format of the disks.
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 11:55 AM John Stoffel via WLUG <
> > wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
> >
> >> >>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Anderson via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
> >>
> >> > Last night we were talking about long-term storage media that won't
> >> > degrade or fail.  What you want is M-DISC:
> >>
> >> > https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-1000-year-dvd-is-here/
> >>
> >> >
> >> https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-98913-M-Disc-100GB-Surface/dp/B017H13DFS
> >>
> >> I see you can still buy the media and the drives to _write_ as of
> >> recently.  Has anyone actually used these?
> >>
> >> I did find this interesting site:
> >>
> >>   https://obsoletemedia.org
> >>
> >> And I currently have an external 2Tb USB harddrive in my safe deposit
> >> box with family photos and such.  I should really buy a new one and do
> >> a swap so I have another sitting around.
_______________________________________________
WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org
To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org
Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/
Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/
Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/FRXWYRDW6SZFYBNSUAPRDHE6FU4B35CQ/