zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Tony Duell wrote:

> > Especially for long term archiving, I think that things like simple, open
> > formats are more important than making sure that everyone's grandma can
> > figure out how to use the archive... ie, assuming that the person has a
> > grasp of being able to learn new things, and some idea of logic are IMO
> > reasonable assumptions.
>
> You alos need to consider what is the most likely sort of person to want
> to access this archive. It's an archive of boot disks, PROMs, etc for
> what are _now_ somewhat obscure computers, and which will presumably be
> even more obscure in the future. The sort of person to need that sort of
> data is likely to have quite a bit of computer knowledge already, and is
> not going to have problesm with tracking down a copy of gnu tar or
> similar....

Future computer historians (or even current ones for that matter) won't
necessarily have the computer skills necessary to track down or even use
tar.

It's not just technical people who will be interested in this stuff.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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