Those are more useful than you might imagine. Certain Alcatel switches store their firmware and config on commodity CF cards (not that you’d know it from the $2,000+ sticker price) and occasionally thrash them to death. Due to some perverse quirk of the bootloader, at least in the model I was dealing with this problem on, they Will Not boot from any CF card larger than they shipped with(this may be fixable with enough l33t skills; but we are talking a proprietary bootloader loading a VXworks payload on some obscure PPC SoC, so my skills are not nearly l33t enough). 32mb CF cards were a hot commodity in the office until we eventually go rid of that variant. Ghastly things.
Not that I’m defending the pricing, or would pay anything close to that, but I actually have that drive, and it still works–and is still useful. I was actually using it as a swap file for a PogoPlug I’d hacked in to running Arch linux, because it’s not actually a flash drive, and so won’t run into the write limitations that flash media have.
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It amazes me how little WalMart discounts clearance items. If they were serious about getting rid of stuff they’d deeply discount it. After all what is the alternative? Throwing it out if you can or get stuck paying to have it recycled.
Except that would also require keeping a card-reading machine in good operating order for untold decades, which in turn might not be able to interface with whatever kind of technology is in use in the future.
Everybody might forget how to interpret modern English and not be able to understand the weird scribbles on the flat, white, tree mush but how far are we gonna go down this particular rabbit hole?
Edit: I Looked for it but can’t quickly find the article on the Clock of the Long Now that describes it containing instructions not just for building tools to make replacement parts for the clock but instructions on how to learn to read the instructions on how to build the replacement parts.
Sure, but not within a human lifetime. Thus it’s still perfectly reasonable to expect properly archived paper records to last long enough to honor a “lifetime guarantee.”
On a related note one of my friends in grad school did her thesis based on the idea of a “digital Rosetta Stone,” saving the same information in a wide array of physical and digital formats under the pretense that a future civilization might learn how to decipher (for example) Zip disks. It was really more of an art project than a serious technical undertaking though.
There’s still the question of the shelf life of the specialised machinery to read the cards. I think the last big punch card manufacturer (Japanese as I recall) went out of business years ago. And is that ASCII or EBCDIC card encoding? Round holes or square? What about the “Dangling Chad” problem which has been know to change the destiny of entire nations? We can still read Chaucer from the 14th century so the slower rate of drift of English makes it much safer than any computer encoding, for archival purposes. How many computer files from today will we be able to read in 2613? Probably none.
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I was hoping/expecting someone would chime in from an “I worked at Wal*Mart” perspective… 
Thanks for the insight.
Naturally, the larger the scale of an operation, the greater the potential for (massive) f*ckups. My retail experience has been in (comparatively) very small businesses. In those settings, even very small amounts of stalled product were harmful, and rapidly noticed. Say that I overbought on frozen turkeys for thanksgiving. Every extraneous bird would be a noted drag on my department margin, and I’d be under considerable pressure to move them at any workable price. And this was at least partly only seen through deduction; there was some matching/feedback from our computerized point-of-sale system, but all detective work was on me and the accounting department.
So, our automated systems could help raise a red flag, but it was up to the meatbags to actually see it and suss out a source. That’s why I have a hard time seeing a supposedly tightly-run ship like a big box store running into this sort of problem, at least at this extreme. I can see the initial goof-up happening, but I have a hard time imagining how it could persist that long. Eight-to-ten weeks, maybe, but not eight-to-ten years. I’m still leaning towards irresponsible behavior, if not malicious intent…
And anyway, don’t globe-spanning super-retailers like Wal*Mart typically have buy-back arrangements?
I did toy with the idea of including that in my original snark but that’s the point I’m making.
We are talking about an expected liftime on the order of 70-90 years for the healthy and lucky ones.
Discounting singularity-based, anti-senesance technology from our considerations we really are talking a quite short time scale. Actual, mass market, currently extant punch card readers are creeping up on being 70 years old now (I think) and haven’t crumbled into dust.
Fair enough, they are museum pieces but the concepts of their function aren’t going anywhere and are we really taking the total collapse of society as a consideration?
Why wouldn’t they be able to leave a bunch of the machines in storage with the files, with (if you really want) printed English instructions on how to build replacements?
But really, all this contortion is for one simple assumption. That you want this data to be stored digitally.
I dunno, maybe you want to encrypt it or compress it or something.
I just think the use of English printed in ink on the paper is a deliberate attempt to be archaic in the face of a challenging set of digital solutions.
I wonder if they also have copies of Atari video game cartridges of things like “Frogger” in their original boxes? Things like that are worth orders of magnitude more than their sticker price on the collectors market.
But they can’t easily interface with modern computers either. If you’re going to have to convert file formats anyway you might as well put the data in a format that will only need to be translated once.
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If that was the ONLY way those records were being stored then I’d tend to agree.
Well you could go the “find a bunch of museum pieces and write instructions for their reconstruction and run a test of said reconstructions with your best guess of the available technology 50 years from now” as long as you don’t mind spending orders of magnitude more money than the printouts with a much more uncertain outcome.
The driving goal for the pace maker guys was to have something that could be searched at machine speeds for something like find all pacemakers using the A498B valve (which we now know to be faulty after 25 years) built in the last 80 years. No one cared if it was stored digitally or not - if a analogue robot using the “hold it up to the light against a negative with the desired characters” principle is used that’s good too. So you don’t have to know and don’t care about future information technology trends. No one cared about the “challenging set of digital solutions” because they weren’t in the IT business. Side-stepping the whole issue provided a superior solution and notions of “archaic” or “advanced” were irrelevant.
Remember, there is no correlation between “old”, “new”, “complex”, “simple”, “digital”, or “analogue” and “good”. “Good” is good w.r.t. your goals and the resources available to reach them and w.r.t. nothing else.
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Wouldn’t surprise me, though unlike apparel there should come a definite sense that obsolete technology becomes really useless really fast these days, as opposed to merely unfashionable. I sense a certain degree of retail predation here.
I own a 1970 Mercury Cougar, which I purchased in 1994. At that time, cars newer than the 1965 model year needed to pass a smog test, which required meeting emissions levels appropriate for the vehicle’s model year. The first time I took it to get smogged, the technician attempted to sell me a kit that he claimed was required for vehicles of my car’s vintage. The kit consisted of two rubber vacuum plugs (with which to disconnect the distributor’s vacuum advance) and a sticker that went on the distributor that described why the plugs were there and that nobody should remove them. And this kit was, ahem, $69 in addition to the cost of the smog check and certificate. I laughed in the dude’s face. He was trying to sell me something that was mandated in California back in, like, 1976 when the state was grabbing at any straw to counteract the smog belched forth by the gas-guzzling V8 engines and non-catalyst dual exhaust systems of the late 1960s. Nailing down the ignition timing must have struck some legislator as a decent half-assed measure to slow the cars down, but I think the requirement to use those kits had been abolished before I was in high school. I have no doubt the guy kept a couple in his shop to foist on unsuspecting schmucks with late-60s to early-70s cars. I went elsewhere to smog my car and passed with flying colors.
A year or so later the smog check requirement cutoff date was moved to 1973, and to celebrate I got meself these license plates:
Last year I tired of the joke (and the added yearly expense of personalized plates), so now I just have normal random plates on the car.
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The one advantage of relatively primitive formats is that, at a cost in speed, you can brute-force them with modern general purpose sensors. A punch card, for instance, isn’t all that tightly packed, so even a lousy scanner or imperfect photograph should allow you to work out where the holes are. Somebody with copies of ISO 1681:1973 and ISO 6586:1980 could bang together a ‘punch card reader’ in software that would probably work on your iRetina personal computer in 2090. If they used a sheetfeed scanner, the throughput would even be decent.
If you used some weird proprietary encoding, or the cards are physically degraded, you have issues; but you aren’t under any obligation to use a card reader.
I’ve got boxes of things like old PATA hard drives and antiquated optical drives over a decade old sitting around that still have at least some functional use left in them. Any number of businesses have closets full of vintage stuff that still work. There’s a very limited but active number of refurbishing facilities throughout the country where 10 year old computer equipment is not rare at all.
Actually, it’s very difficult to erase a hard drive with anything less than a specialized degausser. Floppy disks, on the other hand…
That’s awfully pessimistic, considering we’ve almost completely transitioned to pure digital “cloud” formats already – versus the archaic physical reel to reel tapes, punchcards, floppy discs, CD, DVD, etcetera.
Any physical format is much harder to recover over time simply because the physical equipment is lost, degrades, becomes unreliable. But once you move media to pure, pristine 1s and 0s, the world of bits is much more forgiving to conversions.
If the price on a 32MB one is the same as say a 1GB drive then surely it doesn’t matter that you’re wasting storage space.
I am an advocate for the complete, historical virtualisation of computing.
