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Is there a digital dark age coming?


Herr Barnack

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depends entirely on the end users wish to access old material ........

 

...... plenty of originally coded old Atari/BBC/Spectrum etc games about with software that emulates the old operating systems ......

 

...... v little when it comes to reading old emails and some prehistoric word processing formats etc. as the old software doesn't run on current platforms due to fundamental hardware architecture changes ...... because there is minimal demand .......

 

No different from the boxes of taped music cassettes I junked years ago .... or the videotapes .... the market will provide where there is a need ......

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Colour film fades! I reviewed an 'archive' for a scientific client some years ago which consisted of transparencies kept in their original boxes in cool and dry conditions. Most had still faded to a state which meant that they were unusable. So unless stored very carefully, slides will disappear. Just one example. And when you look back at information not a lot actually survives for vastly long periods (probably just as well in many cases). Really useful information will survive no doubt, but do we really need all the clutter of every single piece, or even a small percentage (still a vast amount), of data being archived?

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  • 1 month later...
The Egyptians taught us how - just hack it into Granite an store it in a desert...

 

I believe these days that is called "an archival print."

 

Anyway, as a documentary/journalistic photographer, this has always been my biggest concern with digital photography. Not so much preserving "my" photographs - but preserving the stories of people I've photographed.

 

I am glad someone in the tech industry is giving it some thought. Although I'm not sure just throwing more technology at the problem (preserve it in "the cloud") is much of an advance....

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I believe these days that is called "an archival print."

 

Ageed, but I'm not sure anyone in the future will be interested in my photographs - who knows.

 

I recently went through my old Kodachromes, going back to the 1970s and they look as good as the day I got them back form the lab (at least that's how I perceive them). I even still have an old Leica slide projector I bought in 1992 that works perfectly, but maybe I better buy up some of the globes so I can use it for the next two hundred years!

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