Software, music and data (from 1990s encyclopaedias to discs full of documents) are rarely encrypted. Movies are, but those were never going to be stored on paper anyway. The keys for decrypting DVDs and Blu-Rays are common enough they’re likely to be found anyway.
How long is a PROM readable? How easy is it to figure out how to read a PROM?
I haven’t heard anything of PROMs having a “limited” (on the century scale) shelf life. In any case, by the time Civilization Mk II reaches that point, they’ll probably be able to create their own CD readers.
Digital computers, lasers, electricity, programming languages down to the binary, file systems for computers, computer displays, Integrated Circuits and processors and last but not least language.
That’s if you’re talking about Civ2 starting from a blank slate in the far distant future. In which case your paper records probably won’t survive either. We have a lot of medieval and older manuscripts - on vellum and parchment (animal skin). Once they switched to paper the written record goes dark for a while because paper doesn’t last as long.
A mere collapse of civilization for a few decades is more likely. People like civilization, because it brings safety. Or you don’t get a total collapse, but something like the fall of the Roman empire where there was still civilization. The really advanced manufacturing disappears, but the day-to-day technology and manufacturing remains.
Yes, paper is better for kickstarting a very pre-industrial Civ2. But optical has it’s advantages too, especially after only a few decades of collapse. Like storing whole libraries.
Silicon storage retention times vary substantially by type: Mask ROM should, barring abuse or sufficiently long continuous service that ion migration kills them(which would take a while, your CPU works a lot harder for most of its life and those rarely fail), last for ages. Eventually the dopants will probably thermodynamics-and-stochastic-phenomena their way around the silicon such that the structure is lost; but it’d take a very long while.
PROMs are somewhat less reliable, since writing to them involves ‘blowing’ some of the connections that were originally present in the chip in its factory state, a process that involves a certain amount of thermal and mechanical brutalization compared to mask ROMs, where the unwanted links are simply omitted during manufacture.
EPROMs, EEPROMs, and flash are less reliable still. Electrons gradually escape from the floating gate, and denser processes and multi-level cells decrease the acceptable amount of loss before it becomes impossible to tell what the intended state of the gate was. Manufacturer-alleged retention times are still usually in the decade range; but that’s hardly archival. Optical media(except the dye-based writeable/rewriteable kind, adding temperature sensitive organic chemistry to your process isn’t a longevity bonus) are likely to survive much better.
In terms of being able to read the stuff in the future, optical media have the advantage that, if you really care that much and understand the format used, you don’t need a purpose-build drive to read it. The purpose built drives are vastly better, of course, and their specialization is why you can get a $20 drive that will read back a DVD and multiple megabytes per second; but if you used an optical microscope with camera to grab an image of the pit/land structure of a disk, you could infer the data from that. Slow, ugly, and nontrivial; but very much possible.
As a different POV: Mossack Fonseca is most likely very unhappy about the switch to digital data. Had they not scanned the old paper documents the leak would have been much smaller.
Having worked in libraries for 20+ years and seeing the gradual change from print to various kinds of digital media it’s always baffled me that the cost of electricity and maintaining the networks is never factored in even though one of the arguments against print is that it’s expensive to set aside all the storage space.
Of course electronic journals are ridiculously priced already as Cornell continues to remind people with their “sticker shock” exhibits (the latest is from 2014–the earlier ones, ironically, seem to have gone offline).
And to make matters worse some publishers are simply nullifying long-term access agreements, telling libraries, “If you want your access back you have to pay for it again, only more this time around.”
It’s happening with some small publishers but also with large publishers like Sage. They use the excuse that they only keep financial records for seven years. For anything older than that the “perpetual access” that they agreed to with legal contracts simply ceases to exist.
A library may keep financial records, including proof of payment, but in at least one case Sage has said, “Because it’s not our copy it’s not binding.”
Digital media have many arguments in their favor but cost and long-term accessibility are not among them.
My only argument for is being able to carry around what would otherwise be a four plus pound tome of a book much easier.
But that oh we automatically destroy contracts over X years too bad pay up again that is major bullshit. I mean if they just want to do a subscription they should just fucking say so in the first place.
ETA : with the nook on low brightness with night color scheme I find I don’t stay up till I finish the book like I used to when waking up at 2am and going out to read with a regular book and having a light on. Good for my sleep but not so much for my reading list.
As I’ve moved a few times, gotten married etc., I’ve thrown out a LOT of old textbooks, novels and papers. They weren’t worth hauling around or storing. But I still have most of my old electronic documents from back then. Complete with off-site backups.
There’s also the ability to make copies. A year ago one of my co-workers had his house burn down. He lost his collection of electronics books, magazines and manuals.
I had been collecting them off Usenet and other sources for a long time and was able to run off a copy for him - thousands of books, magazines and manuals - on several DVD ROMs. Which in turn he’ll have copied to a hard drive, and made backups of.
I’m also bummed because I used to buy a lot of Sage monographs and it was because they were inexpensive, although they did increase their prices over time. So sad to hear they’re screwing over libraries.
I don’t mean to focus on Sage because every publisher has had problems. Every publisher has things they do well and things they do really badly. And I do understand where they’re coming from. None of the publishers who offered perpetual access agreements seem to have thought about the real long-term implications as evidenced by the fact that this is coming up within less than a decade.
The problem is the big publishers won’t admit there’s a problem.
It isn’t. I have no problems with Panasonic’s PCL drivers for example.
But as fuzzyfungus mentioned, HP’s firmware and drivers have earned a bad reputation.
I remember one case back in the '90s where their printer driver would flip the processor from 32-bit into 16-bit mode… and leave it that way.
Or when they finally released Windows 2000 drivers for some of their scanners.I ran the installer… and that was the only time I’ve had to reinstall an OS from scratch. (Others had the same thing happen. HP published a note saying “Oh yeah, it does that. We’ll release a new version in a while.”
A paper system for the medium term (up to a thousand years)
A (gold alloy plates?) system for up to 10,000 years or longer.
The purpose of both systems is to preserve knowledge and information through a cultural collapse, similar to the fall of the Roman Empire. The most likely in the near term is would be a global war with weapons of mass destruction. Which is likely to destroy infrastructure and existing devices to the point that the rebuilding culture will not have the ability to replicate them for at least a hundred years after the event. When they replicate them, the situation will be different and not connected to ours. After several hundred years they have no reason to build their systems to our standards. in the intervening hundreds of years the data may be lost as the storage media may not be understood and used or repurposed for raw materials.
If the next civilization has informational continuity with us, to the point that they have always had access to computers that can read our data, they likely have a copy of GoogleBooks readily available. I am discussing techniques of storing data in a way that a culture that has a nearly blank slate, a complete or semi-complete loss of civilization and technology could recognize and access the data. This becomes most important if you want to send data thousands of years into the future.
We can’t read some 3000 year old human languages, but we can recognize them as language and preserve them for the future so that the information may be deciphered when new clues or better computing takes a shot at it. If we store information for long jumps on media that isn’t obviously data, media that requires complex tools, programming and electricity to read, then that data will morel likely be lost then data on stone tablets, or metal plates or some other human readable stable storage media.
If they do recognize the optical disc as a storage media and read it with a microscope and camera, they will have a stream of binary bits, yes? those bits would refer to standards we use like ASCII, which may or may not have survived. There will also be bits delineating the file format, file system etc.
Let’s say that we get a disc for an alternate Earth where Xerox PARC never happened and they developed their own binary system to encode text, video, audio and other file types. The disc isn’t encrypted, but it is formatted for HAL 12.5, their Windows 2000, equal in every way, but where their binary and programming doesn’t overlap with ours. From the raw binary, could computer science as we know it decode and parse the file system? Determine how to display a video? Or better yet, could they decipher a Windows 2000 formatted CD with muiltimedia files? There are just too many factors and random chance for it to be simple.
Again, I suppose that some of the written primers could be written to describe ASCII, filesystem etc. but that won’t make any sense to a pre-computing culture. We can’t know at what level the the culture that finds the data will be at. Perhaps they’ll have quantum computing, perhaps they’ll have just discovered steel. They may have optics to notice that there are bits on the discs, perhaps they’ll assume they are just a store of “money”.
Again, I don’t think paper is good enough for a thousand years. On the other hand, archeologists have had lots of success unrolling and reading Roman era prayers and requests for curses inscribed on lead strips, rolled up and left in temples.
The problem with metal inscriptions is that they’re good only for relatively TINY amounts of information. Their best use would be something like the gold-plated records on the Pioneer and Voyager probes: High-density digital data on one side, and pictograms on the other describing how to read it.
You can put a set of encyclopedia’s on CD-ROM and run off a few thousand copies and scatter them about in hopes that some survive. But even ONE set of encyclopedia’s on metal plates is a MASSIVE undertaking. If you use gold or some other useful material, someone will reuse it for something else.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia (current revisions only, no talk or user pages). It’s 12 GB compressed, or 49 GB when uncompressed. Even distributing that on PAPER is thoroughly unrealistic, let alone on metal. On optical, it’s trivial.
The disc isn’t encrypted, but it is formatted for HAL 12.5, their Windows 2000, equal in every way, but where their binary and programming doesn’t overlap with ours. From the raw binary, could computer science as we know it decode and parse the file system?
That’s the nice thing about (unencrypted) data formats: They tend to make a lot of sense even when you’re learning from scratch. Back in the Apple II days I used to pick apart games - in 6502 assembler, not the language they were compiled in - and substitute my own graphics. There’s long been a cottage industry in picking apart proprietary data formats so that others can write compatible software.
Again, I’m talking here about something like what you mention above - “a cultural collapse, similar to the fall of the Roman Empire.” Not a world-wide reversion back to the stone age.
The Long Now Foundation is experimenting with etched metal plates, the current prototype is the Rosetta disk with 13000 pages on 4 cm radius (or something around 33 MB when assuming 2700 chars per page). Using 24GB of article text cited here the content of the English Wikipedia would fit on 750 Rosetta disks or so.
But at that point you’re back in the realm of optical discs - no longer readable without technology. (Only microscopes are needed, so Civ2 will be able to read it a century earlier.)
On the other hand if civilization only suffers a Roman Empire-like collapse - most technology still intact - or a more total collapse with a recovery within a few decades - then the current CD-R and DVD-R standards are the better bet. There’ll be a heck of a lot of DVD drives and optical discs still around.
