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[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Wed, 25 May 2005, Kevin Handy wrote:

> Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
>
> >So tell me then how to read the information from a Quipu.  It's a simple
> >device: just a bunch of multi-colored knotted string.  If you can figure
> >this out, there's a huge community of archaeologists who study the Incas
> >who would erect a permanent shrine for you to celebrate your name for all
> >eternity.
>
> This is my point.

Actually, your point was this:

> These stupid people won't have any concept of a computer, so it is
> unlikely that they will be able to read a tape, cd, etc. You will have
> to carve the data on stone blocks in foot high letters.

You were being facetious of course, but I was not.

> The quipu was apparently their equivalent of our
> spreadsheet. They were easy for them to use, and easily understood.
> They aren't even "compressed", "tarred", or "zipped", but still lost.
> Once many could "write"/read them, and they were meant for long
> term archival use (at least many seem to have been archived). As
> easy as it was for them, and as important as they thought these
> documents were, we are unable to read them.

I would imagine you'd agree that we are pretty smart and that the Quipu is
pretty simple, yet we still have not successfully decoded their meaning.

> They thought it was good for long term storage, but we haven't a clue
> as to how to read them. What is so different about computer archives,
> no matter how simple it seems to us, that ours wouldn't suffer the
> same fate.

So getting back to the point, why make archives even more complex by
wrapping the riddle in an enigma?

> > The ancient Egyptians were by all measures a fairly advanced society for
> > their place in history, yet the only reason we know how to read their
> > heiroglyphic writings is because we found teh Rosetta Stone that basically
> > translated it for us.  Again, you cannot assume English will be known in
> > the future.
>
> Same point. The Egyptians thought it was good enough, and easy
> enough, for use as a long term archive (see all the obelisks they
> made). We still lost the understanding of how to understand them.
> How much simpler can you get than "cartoons" carved in stone?
> Yet we still lost the ability to read them for a thousand+ years.
> Will there be a Rosetta  stone to help future people to
> understand a long lost CP/M archive?  I don't care how
> "simple" you think a storage format is, it won't help it
> in the long run.

But will you agree that it at least makes things easier if the archives
are in a plain format?  Would the Rosetta Stone have been any help if the
heiroglyphics had been transcribed to papyrus, then rolled up and stuffed
in a sack to make them easier to distribute and store?  No, it would not.
The papyrus would have crumbled to dust.

> The archive should be for our own use, not some theoretical idiot 2000
> years from now trying to boot a Kaypro. He's probably going to have a
> whole different set of problems with an archive than we could conceive;
> like locating the "any" key.

Right, so don't make the archives more complex than they need to be.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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