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People often seem to get prickly like they feel I am envangelicising here when I am just trying to look at the world as it is today and likely will be in the future. I'm not trying to snatch anyone's tape machine away. I'll dispute some statements that I don't think are true though. Like the idea that computers might forget what to do with a WAV file one day.

20 years ago we were discussing the relative permanence of optical discs and magnetic hard drives. Now that's not even relevant. We have ubiquitous wireless broadband internet. The way we did things before that is not going to be the way we do things after that. The video rental stores have all closed down. We have ubiquitous wireless broadband internet.

I can transfer gigabytes of data all around the world in minutes, if not seconds: just like that.

I suspect our future is going to be drowning in data, all the detritus of our lives piling up in ever-cheaper digital storage. We're going to need AI just to help us sift through the mountains of digital shit we leave behind, a little WALL-E cleaning up after us. It's bound to change the way we look at things.

And yeah, capitalist systems, but we already rely on them to do things like putting power in our sockets and food on our shelves, because of economies of scale, and because here we are in a capitalist society. Likely in the future data centres will be considered critical infrastructure and there will be more regulation. Maybe more public ownership, who knows, that's an argument about capitalism rather than about data centres.

Frankie99 wrote: Fri Aug 30, 2024 9:02 am That's the point. A consumer based niche technology that wasn't able to mature with the rest of its cousins. Digital formats have zillions of examples of consumer based niche file types that have followed that same path and are now lost to time and the progress of machines.

People didn't lose their Super 8 reels because it's a dead format. They lost them because time passes and people lose shit all the time.

But I don't think that's been the case with file formats. How many niche consumer file types of any note really have been lost to time?

I ask because I deal with niche file formats a lot, and times have never been better for people who like niche file formats. You want to read and write 3" disk format for Amstrad CPC range of British home computers from the mid 1980s? Sure you do, and why not. That is not a problem. How about the sample files used by the Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard? My one died so forget that, but I got the files anyway. How about a Vectrex? The Vectrex is cool; the only home console to have a built-in vector monitor, came out in 1982, all over by 1983. I have a Vectrex. I got it with a microSD card reader so you can play Vectrex games off the card reader. Or write your own, maybe one day? (The Vectrex is cool.)

I've got loads of old electronic junk and one of the privileges of the time we live in is just how trivial it is to transfer data to and from all of them, encode and decode it. I've even got a card reader for my Sega Master System now and it cost me all of 15 bucks.

In the future it's only going to be easier as you could conceivably just take a bunch of raw digital data that you didn't even know what it WAS, throw it at an AI and it would have a good shot at discovering whatever text, image, audio or video media was buried in there. I don't naturally think about using computers like that, but future generations will.

But also, those of us who are at least as old as me, which is to say most all a'youse cunts, have lived through the very birth of the home computer revolution. A remarkable time, full of weird and wonderful short-lived consumer devices, many of them extremely regional - like the Welsh home computer (Salut! Dragon 32). A privileged time to see, a time of rapid change. And it has left us I think with a general impression of digital technology being always in a state of flux.

But it actually trends towards standardisation pretty rapidly. ASCII is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and although it was superseded by Unicode (back in 1991), it's still with us today. The .wav file also dates back to 1991. Next year is the 30th birthday of USB. 30 years we've been trying to stick them little thumb drives into the rectangular hole the wrong way up.

Now we've got USB-C but USB-A can still be plugged in today (after three goes). FAT32 has been around since Windows 95.

When it comes to "I Do Not Trust The Capitalists..."?

Think about Nightbreed.

The footage never went anywhere. An executive just said it didn't warrant messing with.

The "The Cabal Cut' version of that film happened because some VHS of what had been cut still was out there.

When Shout! Factory stepped in to talk to Morgan's Creek about the possibility of a director's cut?

Even Barker could not believe the footage was till around somewhere.

So, yeah.

Tape does not exactly seem like garlic and a cross that one can shove into the face of capitalists.

Anthony Flack wrote: Mon Sep 02, 2024 6:06 pm
People didn't lose their Super 8 reels because it's a dead format.
(The Vectrex is cool.)

They lost their Super 8 the same way we all did. The celluloid got so brittle that he film snapped wvery time you loaded a reel on a projector. The only way to confidently store old film stock is to digitize it so something will exist in the future. The only version of anything super old on film we have to watch is because of Telecine. Without it...

One of my regurts is selling my Vectrex before moving out of Chicago. I had room in the van... who was I trying to impress? So cool.

Kniferide wrote: They lost their Super 8 the same way we all did. The celluloid got so brittle that he film snapped wvery time you loaded a reel on a projector. The only way to confidently store old film stock is to digitize it so something will exist in the future. The only version of anything super old on film we have to watch is because of Telecine. Without it...

I have definitely had experience with brittle films (8 & 16mm), but I have lots of regular-8mm (from 1940s) that plays back fine.
Also Super-8 reels from 1970s and after.

I think it's a pretty good example of the "do nothing" path to longevity. A dry shoebox can pretty much do the trick.
You wouldn't see the motion (of course) but you could at least begin decoding it using only your eyes and a light source.

A lot of the films I have are personal films that were shot by people unknown to me, so I guess those films have been lost, in the sense that they're no longer available to the people who might presumably have the most interest or need to view them. But the film stock didn't crumble.

Teacher's Pet wrote: Tue Sep 03, 2024 12:04 pm

Kniferide wrote: They lost their Super 8 the same way we all did. The celluloid got so brittle that he film snapped wvery time you loaded a reel on a projector. The only way to confidently store old film stock is to digitize it so something will exist in the future. The only version of anything super old on film we have to watch is because of Telecine. Without it...

I have definitely had experience with brittle films (8 & 16mm), but I have lots of regular-8mm (from 1940s) that plays back fine.
Also Super-8 reels from 1970s and after.

I think it's a pretty good example of the "do nothing" path to longevity. A dry shoebox can pretty much do the trick.
You wouldn't see the motion (of course) but you could at least begin decoding it using only your eyes and a light source.

A lot of the films I have are personal films that were shot by people unknown to me, so I guess those films have been lost, in the sense that they're no longer available to the people who might presumably have the most interest or need to view them. But the film stock didn't crumble.

The state of the projector definitely goes a long way in helping with that too. When I worked at the cultural center and we did little film fests of old Library films our huge 16mm would snap shit all the time. Old film... old machine... unskilled labor. Not a good combo.

My argument is being met with minutia and tangents as the counter arguments, so I don't think it's contributing anymore. Whether tech can be resurrected isn't a counter to my argument.

Frankie99 wrote: Tue Sep 03, 2024 6:01 pm My argument is being met with minutia and tangents as the counter arguments, so I don't think it's contributing anymore. Whether tech can be resurrected isn't a counter to my argument.

Sorry If I derailed, I wasn't arguing with you... I don't think.

Not meant to level that at anyone in particular, I think my super 8 analogy failed, and I should have used a better one.

Kniferide wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:52 pm Having a single physical copy of a thing is having nothing for the purposes of archive. There is nothing "archival" about analog tape unless you have multiple copies of it. 1 is none, 2 is one. In digital land 1 is 1,000,000,000... if you want it to be and with very little effort/comparative costs.

love analog tape and wish it was feasible for me to use it daily but it just isn't. If I did, I would absolutely bounce out everything to digital files for backup.

I have many single copies of 4 track tapes that I recorded on a whim in 1992-8 that are just sitting on cassettes in a file cabinet in my house. You can come over and listen to them. The information is available. A lot of it isn't very good music, but it's right there to listen to .

One can make multiple copies of analog tapes, of course. But the process of creating and managing multiple copies of a master recording is separate from the initial fact of the master recording. Again - analog gives you two physical masters. Digital does not.

I do not get how there is an argument about that. I can only repeat myself about physical, standardized, non-proprietary storage of information that, even in the event of failure, will still likely yield some considerable percentage of the information.