"Keith Clark" <clarkphotography@hotmail.com>

wrote in message news:408D3CF0.F3B2C562@hotmail.com...

> David Ruether wrote:

> > <snip> Tapes,

> > properly handled and stored, may still offer some archival advantages,

> > hard as that is to believe about this obviously fragile and inadequate

> > medium.

> Yeah - ever hear the story of trying to decode tapes recovered from East German secret police after the Wall came

> down? I hear many of them literally disintegrated (no "Mission Impossible" stuff, just bad storage).

> All this stuff is really depressing.

Yes. On the "good" side, though, is the relatively good condition of

the early audio tapes in the Lomax '50s folk collection, the Cornell

"Bird Lab" animal-sound collection, etc. With luck in selecting good

original tape and with storage conditions, this stuff on tape can be

with us a very long time (or it can be lost quickly, with poor materials

and storage/handling).

> The rush to make everything digital with no good archival backups pretty much means that in a thousand years, if

> humanity survives, nobody will have a clue about our civilization, while texts of the ancient Egyptians written

> on papyrus buried in desert sand may still be found and read. It's kind of sad because it almost guarantees

> another "dark ages" where much of the knowledge accumulated over centuries will be lost again and there will be

> rumors of E.T.'s that built the skyscrapers (that remain). ;->

Yes. We are currently VERY dependent on the continuity of

economic and political institutions for the continuance of what

we call civilization. The details are "in memory" as much as in

"hard copy" - and a loss of either would be disasterous. Let

us hope that leaders with long-term "vision" predominate, or

we are likely to have a short "civilization", as such things go in

history. Issues of not only "memory/hard-copy retention", but

also of "life-sustainability" (environment/economics) and

"social-grace" (just political systems), are essential to be dealt

with, too...;-)

> > And, when was the last time you preferred to color-correct

> > material using a flat-panel display instead of a CRT...?;-)

> When was the last time you were able to accurately calibrate two different monitors to come even close to the

> same color rendition, much less accurate? Accurate color rendition is like the search for the Holy Grail. Which

> is why I hang on to my 17" Viewsonic PT775 even though it's so small.

Ah, yes - but perfection is always elusive, though a good

approximation is much easier to obtain (and that is superior

to anything that is obviously a poor approximation...;-).

--

David Ruether

d_ruether@hotmail.com

http://www.David-Ruether-Photography.com