Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Teo Zenios wrote:

> Specifications are nice, but unless you get the people who still have the
> hardware and software to join in it will get nowhere.

Well, that's part of developing a specification, isn't it?  Getting buy-in
is of course critical, which is why I'm going to approach this from the
standpoint of creating an internationally recognized standard that has an
RFC and everything.

> The problem is getting
> the people to follow the standards and image their disks, once the images
> have been collected you can do what you want with them and not worry about
> the platform they came from.

Once the standard is in place then people can choose to use it or not.  If
not, that's their loss...their archives will have a lesser chance of being
propagated, unless they get a lot of other people to do whatever it is
they're doing.

I would hope that people would see the value in a standard like I am
proposing and use it.  It's not my intention to have just another format
that people can choose.  No, this will be THE standard.

> CAPS software uses an Amiga 1200 platform to
> get images from the original disks, Commodore 64 users can grab images from
> a 1541/1571 drive connected to a PC running DOS connected to the drive with
> a xe1541 cable and some software. As far as I know there is no hardware that
> can precisely read all of the different disk formats and sizes let alone
> deal with all copy protection methods (such as laser hole in the media
> itself). You still need the original hardware of the platform it ran on to
> get the images.. so you have to get the people of the different platforms
> behind you (good luck).

Exactly.  And it's not a matter of luck, but rather a matter of survival.
Do you want the images of YOUR favorite platform to survive into the next
decade/century/millenium?  Great, use the standard.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers   ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com  || at http://marketplace.vintage.org  ]