zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Randy McLaughlin]

From: "Dwight K. Elvey" <dwight.elvey at amd.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:33 PM


> >From: "Randy McLaughlin" <cctalk at randy482.com>
> ---snip---
>>
>>It works for the largest base, even for those that are just now ready to
>>learn.
>>
>>I am not advocating winzip as a perfect system, just a system that fits my
>>personal desire to spread archives to as many as want to download them.
>>
>>
>>Randy
>>www.s100-manuals.com
>
> Hi Randy
> For what you are doing, providing data to users, you are
> doing the right thing. For an archive, it is the wrong thing.
> For an archive, one should have the least and simplest
> amount of encoding or remoteness from the original as
> possible. Feeding the information into a form such as a zip
> does not meet that criteria.
> Providing data to the users in the most universal and current
> format is the proper thing for an archivist to do in many
> cases ( like you do ). Still, you have shut out many MAC
> users and some of those that are so far in the past that
> they are still running on a 8080 CP/M machine.
> Imagine that some future archivist digs up Sellams library.
> He must first realize that he needs something that interprets
> x86 instructions to unwind the encoding. He then has to figure
> out what the purpose of the data was.
> Many here have made the assumption that the information would
> smoothly be moved along to the next current media and retranslated
> to the next handy compaction or encapsulation tool.
> The real world isn't like that. There will be gaps in the
> maintenance. For many reasons, like budgets or just apathy.
> A good archivist need to do the best to anticipate this
> and consider this as part of their strategy.
> Dwight

I obviously need to make the directions clearer:  Many MAC & Linux users 
have emailed be asking to send them particular files in different formats so 
they could decompress it.  So far when I restate that just by renaming the 
file they can use it, they try and it works.  I have yet to find any of the 
files I put in a self extracting archive that everyone using anything close 
to current hardware can't extract.

This means that the only systems that can not extract the archival data 
meant for classic computers are the classic computers themselves :-(. 
Limiting the archives to the tools available for the machine it is meant for 
would exclude the people that need it most, "Windoze only" users need to 
have their hands held to get started.  I expect people with 20-30 years of 
computer experience to be able to handle both classic & current tools.

As far as any of this goes I expect that just as I have repackaged the data 
from cards/tapes/disks/scans of print outs/etc in the future the zip/tar/etc 
packages will be repackaged again.

I have some archives that are archives of archives and intend to go back and 
extract the original archives into un-packaged treed directories then 
repackage into just a zip format so that future users don't have to figure 
out the zip format to then have to figure out the myriad of CP/M 
packaging/squeeze formats.


Randy
www.s100-manuals.com