Re: The Return Of Cassette Tape

And the punch cards?

How about employee clock-in machines that actually punch cards? I am not talking about 100% electronic ones.

I am talking about physical punching clock-in machines, not contactless ones.

Meow....

Wile E Coyote....using an Acme product.

I never saw on that would punch the card, just stamp the date and time with a loud clunk.

They've been emulated from solid drive.

Do 'we' need Time Clocks .... or can The Boss just check what time 'we' turn our Work Computers "On" and "Off"??

Nothing can replace the durability and certainty of ink, pen/stamp and paper. They are physical, unlike electronics including computers and cellphones. Of course, there was/is fake and/or fading inks. Meow.... :)

That unique, mechanical sound is a good sign of something happened, unlike stupid beeps and flashing LEDs. :)

Except for clay tablets baked in a good, hot fire.

That is one thing that bothers me, If the many pages of my genealogy work were on paper, I could be found 100 years from now, be read. Barring catastrophe. The failure of an organization, or an unfortunate press of he delete key could remove 20 years of work. I wonder it my hard drives would even be readable in 100 year.

The benefit is digital is replication. Instead of a roomful of monks laboriously copying a manuscript by hand, that one press of a button can replicate your work across the world.

Of course this is only as good as the systems supporting it. I wrote Ancestry asking what provisions they had for protecting my data in the event of a bankruptcy or similar catastrophe, and didn't get a very satisfying answer.

What? Did ancestry fire all their monks? That's a damn shame.

Bastards.

You can use modern computer technology to produce clay tablets. It's just impact printing back in the days of dot-matrix printers, Professor! And even older tech that is type-writer!!! ;)

The Babylonian Map of the World with Irving Finkel | Curator’s Corner S9 Ep5 - YouTube

Leroy Anderson Ritvélin The Typewriter - YouTube

The M-DISC used to be made by a small startup company. It went bankrupt. Verbatim acquired it. The M-DISC DVDs immediately disappeared. Leaving the BD-R 25GB ones. Apparently, within the last few years, the electronic label on the BD-R M-DISC changed, indicating they're not M-DISC and not made in the M-DISC factory. This means you're back to using "gold" DVDs for archival store.

Not all the advice in that article, makes sense. Modern Hard Drives, have servo wedges, that are written once at the factory, and must remain functional for the life of the drive. If re-writing the sectors every three years was a "clever" thing to do, then the servo wedges stand to limit the service life of the drive. You would not use Helium drives for archival storage (these have welded lids and no screws visible on top), as the Helium cannot stay in those drives forever. Lower capacity drives are air-breathers.

When you purchase hard drives, none of the pictures are "real" pictures, it's all a lot of fakery. For example, the last HDD I bought, it has solid aluminum structures set aside to be drilled and tapped, yet, they did not drill and tap those! This means two of the mounting holes I could have had, were missing. This is the advantage of advertisements that use "real straight from factory" pictures and not the AL Slop pictures that are so popular in marketing.

Kingston used to solve this problem, by showing engineering drawings on their web site, for DIMM products. This allowed a customer to "inspect" the construction and tell what they were getting. Few companies do a thing like that. Disk drives really need that now, because of mounting hole practices. And an assortment of other lies or omissions. Disk drives actually have a 100 page document each, with all sorts of information about a design. Due to the inaccuracies in the marketing information, this kind of document is what we should be using when selecting products.

Summary: You're delusional if you think your time capsule is lasting 100 years. Our supply of tech toys, is too tentative to be making such predictions. And as fast as we identify a superior solution, the company making it goes out of business. I would think 40 years is a good target for time capsules, and still, with adequate temperature and humidity control. You can't store a time capsule in a 130F garage :-) Maybe your 12 color fine art prints on special paper, the yellow fades out at 130F.

Lots of people, put no effort into the container for the time capsule. They may use "good media" to some end, then use a Glad garbage bag as the outer protection. I haven't been to any back yard ceremonies where a purpose built container with good gaskets was used. It's always a mayonnaise jar with a rusted-thru lid :-) The lids rust on those.

Paul

That is if you do it fast as technology changes. I can hardly replicate my data stored in hundreds of floppies. Even old hard disks are difficult.