zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Jules Richardson]

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 12:50 -0500, Jim Leonard wrote:
> That's why I find format discussions so frustrating.  If I write an
> article discussing some programming topic, and I do it in a straight
> text editor and save as an ASCII text file on a floppy disk, and
> then compress that file using RAR (which adds error-correcting code
> to the archive) and distribute it online, what is "the original"?
> Is it the RAR archive... or the extracted text file... or the
> information itself contained in the file?

it's whatever the furthest-back thing in the process that lets you
recreate any later stages is, I suppose. So in your example, the ASCII
text file is the original; anyone could make a RAR file of that at a
later date should they so want to.

cheers

Jules