Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: (OT) OMG! I'm returning the computer from HELL!!!!

Acadia opened this issue on Feb 12, 2007 · 116 posts


Morgano posted Mon, 19 February 2007 at 12:43 AM

The Ancient Egyptians had (almost) all the answers, if only because of their climate.   Even their papyrus survives (sort of), if they dropped it in the right place.   I remember seeing a pile of papyrus fragments from the Fayyum in a museum in Oxford.   Just the thing, if you like jigsaws and can handle lousy Roman-era Greek handwriting.   Since I can't read my own scrawl, it was not for me, though.

There have already been some spectacular failures with digital archiving, though.   Priceless texts have been ripped apart to preserve them for eternity, except that they have been stored on digital media which have become obsolete very soon afterwards, because the machines to read them have expired and have not been replaced with anything compatible.

I think that that is a threat to everyone, because there is no such thing as a reliable digital storage medium.   Any hard drive, whether internal or external, can fail suddenly.   CDs are vulnerable to damage and DVDs, if anything, are more so.

The real wonder-substance for record-keeping is vellum;  it's almost indestructible.   Sadly, it's not great for computer-generated graphics.   Nevertheless, the inventor (or inventrix) who finds a way to digitise everything and transfer it to vellum will have far exceeded the inventors of the CD and DVD.