Is it Daata or Dadta?
Everything today is zeros and ones, at least that's the way the computer deals with it. Very few things in our lives are analog anymore. Analog is when you put a needle on a record and it played music. Digital is when you put a CD in a slot and it reads the 0s and 1s and figures out it's music and plays it.
It's actually a little disconcerting.
In the late 1800's (1898 to be exact) someone came up with the idea of recording sound on a flat disc, rather than a cone, as Edison first did. This allowed them to be easily molded and then re casted in vinyl plastic. In the mid 1920's everyone settled on a standard speed for the rotation of the record; 78.26 rotations per minute. Prior to that, you had to manually "dial in" the record by using a speed lever next to the turn table.
This set the standard for the recording industry for over 30 years, and in fact up until the early 1970's "78's" were still manufactured. Even when the much superior 33.3 rpm stereo records came out, where by requiring a much more sophisticated playing unit, most still had a setting to play the older technology.
Even after the use of magnetic tape to record with - a master cut on a disc and replicated was still the choice to archive what was on the tape.
Now tape is not even used at all. Everything is recorded directly into the computer on to a hard drive where it is mixed and exported in a digital format to any number of formats - which may or may not go to an "archival" medium.
This is not only true of music. It's true of what I write here, and countless other things that are in the digital domain, and exist there only. Photos, scanned documents, manuscripts, et al. All 0s and 1s.
One day the hard drive fails and just like that - ZAP - photos of Jimmy's fifth birthday are all gone!
Which leaves the question. How do you archive all this stuff in such a way that it's preserved.
Programs and operating systems are constantly being updated or replaced. You can't stick a 78 record in your CD drive to listen to it. Nor can you play an audio cassette. Not unless you have sitting on a shelf in your basement an old record player, and old 8 track player, and old cassette player, and old Betacam player, an old VHS player, and soon, who knows what else will be replaced by some bigger, better gadget whereby making all of this obsolete.
Everything today is zeros and ones, at least that's the way the computer deals with it. Very few things in our lives are analog anymore. Analog is when you put a needle on a record and it played music. Digital is when you put a CD in a slot and it reads the 0s and 1s and figures out it's music and plays it.
It's actually a little disconcerting.
In the late 1800's (1898 to be exact) someone came up with the idea of recording sound on a flat disc, rather than a cone, as Edison first did. This allowed them to be easily molded and then re casted in vinyl plastic. In the mid 1920's everyone settled on a standard speed for the rotation of the record; 78.26 rotations per minute. Prior to that, you had to manually "dial in" the record by using a speed lever next to the turn table.
This set the standard for the recording industry for over 30 years, and in fact up until the early 1970's "78's" were still manufactured. Even when the much superior 33.3 rpm stereo records came out, where by requiring a much more sophisticated playing unit, most still had a setting to play the older technology.
Even after the use of magnetic tape to record with - a master cut on a disc and replicated was still the choice to archive what was on the tape.
Now tape is not even used at all. Everything is recorded directly into the computer on to a hard drive where it is mixed and exported in a digital format to any number of formats - which may or may not go to an "archival" medium.
This is not only true of music. It's true of what I write here, and countless other things that are in the digital domain, and exist there only. Photos, scanned documents, manuscripts, et al. All 0s and 1s.
One day the hard drive fails and just like that - ZAP - photos of Jimmy's fifth birthday are all gone!
Which leaves the question. How do you archive all this stuff in such a way that it's preserved.
Programs and operating systems are constantly being updated or replaced. You can't stick a 78 record in your CD drive to listen to it. Nor can you play an audio cassette. Not unless you have sitting on a shelf in your basement an old record player, and old 8 track player, and old cassette player, and old Betacam player, an old VHS player, and soon, who knows what else will be replaced by some bigger, better gadget whereby making all of this obsolete.
When the first PC's came out in the '80's, before Micosoft, there were no operating systems, just DOS. The word processing program I used was WordStar, spreadsheets Lotus 123. Backup was done on large floppy discs. A black CRT screen with gold characters was how you looked at your work.
Once MS Word came along it didn't know how to read the WordStar files, so I had to buy Lotus Amipro, which would read the old files (I had to buy a floppy drive as my new computer wouldn't read them, only diskettes). Once the files were in Amipro I could convert them to MS Word and the job was done. Kind of. Once a file was converted from WordStar to Amipro to MS Word for some reason spell check no longer functioned, and in order to reinstate that feature, I had to open a new file, copy and paste the old file into the new one.
Believe it or not, I still keep Amipro on my computer - although my computers no longer have diskette drives, I had to buy one (just as zip drives used to be the mode of storage.)
Now I have an external 80 gig storage drive and a 1 gig thumb drive to back stuff up.
But the point is, if you don't constantly update your operating system and software and your files as well you can't:
1. - Read your old stuff
2. - Open a file that someone else has sent you!
I have a box of my Grandfather's manuscripts. They were typed on a Smith Corona typewriter. And guess what, I don't need one of those to read his words. Just a good reading lamp and a nice glass of wine.
Cheers!
I have a box of my Grandfather's manuscripts. They were typed on a Smith Corona typewriter. And guess what, I don't need one of those to read his words. Just a good reading lamp and a nice glass of wine.
Cheers!
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