Re: CD Life
The bottom line: it depends on who you talk to. The manufacturers are claiming
+75 years but some people say the cheap brands can start to deteriorate in a
matter of weeks. ...
Personally, I'm partial to punched paper tape. In the attic I have
an old FIODEC 6-channel tape from the RLE PDP-1 that Ken Olson gave
to MIT. I punched the tape out over 30 years ago. It has a copy of
the source code for Spacewar on it. I do not have a tape reader,
currently, but if I did, I could read the tape. (Don't need, to,
though. The code is on line at
http://st.cs.uiuc.edu/oopsla/spacewar.mac and various other places.)
In another corner of the attic I have about three or four thousand
player-piano rolls, which are sort of an 88-channel paper tape. I do
have readers for this format; indeed, I have two of them, one of
which probably works. A couple of the rolls I have are nearly a hundred
years old. Others are nearly brand new. Playing music on a player
piano is, I assure you, lots more fun than listening to the vulgar
synthetic bass at 130dB that issues from cars driven by the newly deaf.
For analog recording vinyl (or the older hard rubber or shellac of
78 RPM) is good. I have some 78s that are about as old as the piano
rolls. But still not quite as much fun.
Paper tape might not be the best solution, though. 600 megabytes
stored on paper tape calculates out as follows. If I remember
correctly it's 8 bytes per inch. So 600 bytes needs 75 inches of
tape. 75 megainches is about 6 megafeet, or 6000 kilofeet, or
about 1000 miles of paper tape. The "high-speed" tape punch runs
at 50 bytes per second. To punch 600 bytes takes 12 seconds. 600
megabytes require 12 megaseconds, or 12,000 kiloseconds. There are
3.6 kiloseconds in an hour. (12,000 / 3.6) = (4000 / 1.2) = 3333 hours.
3333 hours / 168 hours per week comes out to nearly 20 weeks, not
counting time to change tapes, empty the chad bucket, and replace
the burned out punch.
Look for a Certified Archival CD (or replacement technology) to
appear soon, if one already has not.
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References:
Re: CD Life: From: John Posada
Re: CD Life: From: Lee Hunter
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