Who Cares?

by R41 - 1/1/07 9:07 AM

In Reply to: Alcohol by MrDeBeuker

What difference does it make if the CD disintegrates in 10 years or in 1000 years? We don't really buy computers, we "rent" them until they suffer a final failure or for four years, whichever comes first. Commonly available media today did not exist ten years ago, and modern computers are unable to access media that was in common use 30 years ago. Can you read your 8" and 5" floppy disks? What about the audio cassette tapes from your VIC-20, Sinclair, or TRS-80? The microcassettes from your HP-41? ROM's from your HP-41 and HP-71? Yet, photographic negatives of Abraham Lincoln are still around and are still printable and ink-on-paper or ink-on-animal skin documents are around that are much older. And cuneform clay tablets are around that go WAY back. Possibly the greatest threat to information is repeated redacting that some documents like the bible suffer at the hands of censors and politically correct tyrants.

In the long run, the sun will become a red supergiant and engulf the orbits of all the planets out to mars, and nobody will ever know that we were here. Whatever storage medium we use best be on Jupiter or beyond.

As for storage defects, there is a whole branch of computer science called "fault tolerant computing" wherein we study error detecting and error correcting codes. The consequece is that a cleverly encoded body of data can be restored to perfection if it is not excessively corrupted. This all becomes a probability game where you pay for improved reliability with extra redundant bits. There is no reason CD's need to be susceptible to scratches.

I once tried to clean a CD with acetone. It had some kind of adhesive, probably rubber cement, on it. The result was not good. However, polycarbonate plastic is wonderful stuff and has lots of uses. It withstands most chemical attack, it is easily formed at high temperature, and easily cut or machined.