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Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

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Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#61

Post by WalterBright »

dmix wrote: post #59
WalterBright wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sur…

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).

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.)

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#63

Post by FillardMillmore »

bobthepanda wrote: post #40
allovernow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data types because they statistically compress high level abstract data which can then be used to fill in regions with high error rate, although if you did that at a large scal…

Considering we can read parchments thousands of years old, and stone tablets going back even further, perhaps we should focus efforts on copying what we can to the time-tested preserved data formats.

Im going to assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but if you happen to find a way to copy Mario 64 to a stone tablet, I'd love to hear about it.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#64

Post by gsich »

karatestomp wrote: post #32
pkroll wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days.

Team Negative 1's scan & restorations of 35mm prints are my favorites. Empire's not done yet, but the other two are.

There is some Despecial version for Empire. But in comparison Empire is also the least modified.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#65

Post by mml »

The "removed a rib" thing was started by Gabriele D’Annunzio, father of Italian fascism. Most likely untrue, but a rumor also most likely to be spread by its subject.

Check out https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-bastards/e/66732... for the details behind this truly unlikely person.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#66

Post by einpoklum »

WalterBright wrote: post #56
allovernow wrote: post #3

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

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 sur…

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?

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#67

Post by dmix »

WalterBright wrote: post #61
dmix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.)

What do you program in today?

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#68

Post by bachmeier »

dmix wrote: post #67
WalterBright wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

What do you program in today?

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

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#69

Post by jamiek88 »

ris wrote: post #50

Related: rescuing historic teletext pages from VHS recordings of broadcast TV: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext

WOW!

What a brilliant idea! So obvious now, the teletext data must have been embedded into the tv picture thus captured by VHS recording.

This got me very excited, I'd love to rebuild the old Ceefax 101 pages.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#70

Post by olivermarks »

What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube (assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.
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