The Push to Save Old Electronic Data - Too Little Too Late ?
B1ackwater
Fresh start for lost file formats
The project aims to get at files held on older storage media
Long lost file formats could soon be resurrected by pan-European
research.
The 4.02m euro (£3.58m) project aims to create a universal emulator
that can open and play obsolete file formats.
Using the emulator, researchers hope to ensure that digital materials
such as games, websites and multimedia documents are not lost for
good.
The emulator will also be regularly updated to ensure that formats
that fall out of favour remain supported in the near and far future.
Called Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (Keep), the project
aims to create software that can recognise, play and open all types of
computer file from the 1970s onwards.
As well as basic text documents it will also let people load up and
play old computer games that technology has left behind.
"People don't think twice about saving files digitally - from
snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives,"
said Dr Janet Delve, a computer historian from the University of
Portsmouth and one of the research partners on Keep.
"But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the
technology used to 'read' it disappearing altogether," she said.
Without work to preserve ways to access the formats that are common
today, 21st century citizens risk leaving a "blank spot" in history,
said Dr Delve.
Already the number of unreadable documents in archives is beginning to
mount up.
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OK ... as far as it goes anyhow - which ain't nearly
far enough.
I've got a bunch of old 8-inch floppies, formatted for
a DEC/VAX operating system. A handful of old game/pgm
and data cartridges for VIC-20s and C-64s too.
How much stuff is out there meant for the old 6809-based
Tandy 'Color Computer' or the funky dual-processor TI-99-4a
(programs actually ran on the VIDEO processor chip, not so
much on the 'main' 9900 cpu) or yer old Atari 400/800 ?
Sinclair ZX-81s ? Bill Gate's hand-writ BASIC for the
Altair-8800 or the Radio Shack TRS-80/100 proto-laptop ?
Sage II ? Programs & data for TI-57 calculators ? Anyone
remember CP/M-68k ? Idris ? PDOS ?
What about bigger stuff - all those old IBM and Data General
minis and mainframes ? Hell, some of those dinosaurs are
STILL in use because they're running complex legacy accounting
systems in COBOL nobody dares replace. What about all the
megabuck engineering stuff that ran on those neat-o Cray
supercomputers ? What format did Cray use for magnetic
tape storage ? Burrought B5000s ? What about punch-tapes ?
Therein lies the problem. It's not just "data formats" but
the HARDWARE, FIRMWARE and OPERATING SYSTEMS too. Somewhere
there are mountains of archived data tapes ... with no
compatible reader units. Thousands of programs in which
millions (billions ?) of dollars is vested - but no more
compatible computers to run 'em on. Lots of that data
was tightly packed in whatever format the specific
programmer came up with - and is ONLY readable by the
original program unless the pgm docs are still around
(and were current - proprietary formats change constantly
and were often bit-level compacted back when storage was
extremely expensive).
Fortunately, FPGA chips make it (somewhat) easy to emulate
obsolete CPUs ... but those CPUs were supplimented with ROMs
and unique hardware with unique 'idiosyncracies'. And then
there's the MEDIA too - paper tapes, cardboard punch-cards,
magnetic tape, early hard disk stacks and magnetic drums too.
Some of the media is perishable - oxides come unglued from
magtape, paper rots and crumbles, old disk platters corrode.
Some of this stuff is of 'historical' interest only. Rather
a lot involves vast datasets created by engineering, satellite,
planetary-probe and scientific apps. I wonder how much early
space-flight data & video is stored ONLY on 2" reel-2-reel
videotape ? Business records - both of corporate interest
AND academic interest ... the raw stuff you build economic
models from ?
It's a problem.
At least they reconstructed the Bletchley Park 'Colossus' so
they can (theoretically) run the clever programs that decoded
the Enigma codes. Apparently someone finally built Babbages
Analytical Engine too ... but will it run a debugged version
of Ada Lovelaces original 1840s computer program ?
zzbu...@netscape.net
It's definitely a problem, but it's also why the people who
understand
the problem, work with Optical Computers, CD, DVD, HDTV
Holograms, Holographic Memory, Pv Cells, Fiber Optics, USB, XML,
and Laser-Guided Phasors, rather than with scientists.
Scotius
I read about the Charles Babbage machine in Popular Mechanics
around 15 years ago or so. I think it was Charles anyway... not sure.
Fascinating stuff.
I was going to suggest that maybe a lot of stuff on the
earlier Cray computers wasn't relevant, but considering that India
bought a bunch of Cray 1s just a few years ago that can do 50 billion
calculations per second, perhaps it's premature to suggest that.