[NTLUG:Discuss] CD Turning 25

[Robert Pearson]

On 8/17/07, Steve Baker <steve at sjbaker.org> wrote:
> Dennis Rice wrote:
> > An article on Slashdot today says that the CD, originially introduced
> > by Philips, is today 25 years old.
>
> I actually worked on that project - the first ever CD-ROM was a
> demonstration of a dictionary - but because typing all those words
> in was going to be a major pain, we only did the letter 'O'!
>
> 50 of the demo CD were pressed - but as far as we can tell, not a
> single one of them has survived to the present day.  I wrote the
> software for a paint program that was used to do the illustrations
> for the CD-ROM, and I have just one screenshot from that application:
>
>    http://www.sjbaker.org/steve/personal/first_ever.html
>
> > I have been thinking lately, so
> > where is mass storage going in the future (get out your foggy
> > forecasting applications)?  We are seeing the demise of the floppy
> > disk for storage, ZIP drives are really now "dead" (?), Syquest drives
> > are long since dead (but I still have them with valuable data and no
> > way to read them), CDs are being replaced with DVDs, higher capacity
> > disks are in the works.....
>
> Sooner or later we have to give up on essentially 2D technologies
> (disks) and move to some kind of 3D system - so I think holography
> is going to make it into a product eventually.
>
> > So how does one insure that data is not lost (as I have done with my
> > old Syquest) as technology advances?
>
> I don't have a problem with that.  I still have the sources for some
> programs I wrote back in the 1970's that was on DECtape and papertape.
>
> The trick is to upgrade your storage systems more frequently than
> they go out of production - and to simply copy everything onto new
> media each time.  For text files that's plenty good enough - for
> word processor files - be sure to save them as text - and for photos
> and movies, export them to new formats whenever possible.
>
> The really bad thing to do is to leave files in old formats on old
> media for too long.
>
> For every old format there is a window of opportunity when that
> format is going out of style and a new format is coming in.  You
> simply have to be ready when that time comes and copy your files
> while the window is open.
>
> Some of my files from college went from punched cards to paper tape
> to DEC tape to 9 track to 8" floppy to 5" floppy to 3" floppy to
> CD-ROM.  I'm about to remaster all of the CD-ROMs onto DVD-ROM.
>
> The beauty of it is that the sum total of all of those ancient files
> takes up a microscopic percentage of each new media - so it's never
> terribly painful to store them.  All of the work I ever wanted to keep
> from around 1975 to around 1985 is less than 10Mbytes.  It's trivial
> to keep it around - I just have to remember to change the format of
> pictures and such.  When PCX image files started to get unpopular,
> I converted them to GIF - now that GIF is fading, I'm moving them
> to PNG.  I fully expect to have to do this again in another 10 years.
>
> The saddest part is that old software generally ceases to work and
> is generally very painful to get running again on more modern systems.

That is amazing!
What's the oldest CD/DVD you have been able to recover from?
I was full of confidence about CD/DVD Storage until I started reading
about the archive life properties:
<<http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,107607,00.html>>

I had a couple of more on the Adaptec Storage Advisors Blog but they
appear to be down. Here they are anyway for future reference:
<<http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2006/01/10/crappy-cds/>>
<<http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2006/03/29/crappy-cds-part-deux/>>

One thing the "media server" concept can do is roll the media forward
based on archive life. Typically the media archive life is longer than
the required Information retention period or the useful lifespan of
the application to read that format with.