Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Friday February 28, 2020 @05:58PM (#22447203)

Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media.

My oldest files are from 1977 - proof:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10

My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size.

(My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.)

I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sure there was nothing but crap on them, but it would be fun to see what kind of crap it was.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by einpoklum on Friday February 28, 2020 @06:23PM (#22447362)

But - and sorry for the morbid question - what about when you grow older, and may not be able to take care of that? Or when you pass away?

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by glouwbug on Saturday February 29, 2020 @10:36AM (#22451040)

Very little has survived on paper considering how many people have lived in the past.

It's just life. A lot of what may seem important with our backups really isn't. Whatever we have produced today will return to the earth, and will be reinvented by generations in the future.

It's their lives to live, not ours.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by chriscappuccio on Saturday February 29, 2020 @03:04PM (#22452689)

I love this comment

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:44PM (#22448890)

A chunk I've made open source on Github. Other stuff all fits on one drive, and I'll just give it to a family member(s) who wants it.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by lm28469 on Saturday February 29, 2020 @08:34AM (#22450433)

You have to come to term with the fact that 99.99% of (your/all) medias are useless in the grand scheme of things.

Imagine having to take care of the backup of your ancestors data on 10 generations, that'd be ridiculous.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Saturday February 29, 2020 @03:05PM (#22452700)

Well, sure. But I have ancestors who go back in the US before the American Revolution, but all I know about them is a name and a date or two. I'm curious about more.

You also don't really know what future people might find interesting. Archaeologists like to sift through ancient trash dumps :-)

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by nitrogen on Saturday February 29, 2020 @12:46PM (#22451831)

Imagine having to take care of the backup of your ancestors data on 10 generations, that'd be ridiculous.

I had an idea about this but realized it would be far more useful for more sinister purposes and stopped.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by staticautomatic on Friday February 28, 2020 @07:52PM (#22447828)

Surely there's a startup for that.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by Mountain_Skies on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:18PM (#22448527)

Wow, I had no idea that Empire went back that far. My friends and I had lots of fun staying up all night playing the PC version in high school. Glad to see many before us got to enjoy your work too.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:46PM (#22448899)

I had no idea what I was doing when I made it, I just wanted to play it myself.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by dmix on Friday February 28, 2020 @06:03PM (#22447233)

Fortran always seems like such an odd looking language to a modern developer like myself, who's learned a fair share of languages.

I want to sit down and figure it out one day given how prominent it was (and still is for many critical systems).

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Friday February 28, 2020 @06:09PM (#22447269)

The Fortran I used for Empire was FORTRAN-10, a DEC variant with many extensions to the then-Standard FORTRAN IV.

There was an earlier Empire I wrote in BASIC, but alas it was lost. Some of its vestiges remain in the Fortran version, such as a variable named Z6. (Variables in that BASIC were one letter and one digit.)

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by dmix on Friday February 28, 2020 @06:29PM (#22447395)

What do you program in today?

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by bachmeier on Friday February 28, 2020 @06:31PM (#22447411)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by dmix on Friday February 28, 2020 @06:53PM (#22447534)

Well, that certainly answered my question! Thanks for the heads up.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by allovernow on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:14PM (#22448770)

Ironically the Punch cards will probably Outlast literally everything else that's digital.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:45PM (#22448896)

Sure, but nobody wants to deal with a terabyte of holes.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by supermatt on Saturday February 29, 2020 @01:03AM (#22449220)

Storing the holes isn’t an issue. They compact infinitely, and don’t degrade under any conditions. It’s reapplying them to some card stock that’s time consuming and error prone.

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Re:Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to ... by WalterBright on Saturday February 29, 2020 @04:00AM (#22449710)

I remember paper tape being dodgy when both punching and reading the holes, meaning that once a certain number of bytes are processed, random bit errors are a certainty.

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