zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Randy McLaughlin]

From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at siconic.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:43 PM


> On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
<snip>
>> *Everything* is a proprietary binary format, and in the grand scheme
>> of things, compression is simply a binary encoding.  That's why I
>> think damning a certain archiving program/format just because of the
>> platform it runs onis silly.
>
> This misses the point entirely.  With a ZIP archive you are munging the
> raw data into something it is not.  I guess if you wanted to be psycho you
> could also consider ASCII to be a "proprietary binary format", but 40
> years of history and standardization would disagree with you.
>
> See Dwight's last reply re: archivist standards.  Putting stuff in a ZIP
> file is NOT archiving.
>
>> I see people on the thread complaining about having to bundle a
>> windows emulator with each archive.  Excuse me?  Let's look at some
>> popular formats:  TAR, ZIP, RAR all have source-code unarchivers.
>> Which means they can run on any machine with a C compiler.  So
>> what's with all the paranoia?  Just use whatever works as long as
>> more than one major platform can extract it.
>
> For now.  What about 1 year from now?  5 years?  10 years?  50 years?  100
> years?  500 years?
>
> Think LONGTERM.
>
>> (Not directed at Sellam, just commenting on all thread participants.)
>
> Ain't no thang ;)
>
> -- 
>
> Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer 
> Festival
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> International Man of Intrigue and Danger 
> http://www.vintage.org
>
> [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage 
> mputers   ]
> [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com  || at 
> http://marketplace.vintage.org  ]

There is no guaranteed method to go 500 years, the only reasonable thing is 
to go with the best available.

In this case best means a format understood by the majority.

In the future ZIP formats will be better understood than any other current 
format for the simple reason there are more zip files to examine than any 
other.

Packaging data understood by a tiny fraction of the world guarantees that it 
will be near impossible to use in the future.


Randy
www.s100-manuals.com