09.14.07
Preserving our digital history…
The Digital Doomesday Book created in the UK in 1986 is already nearly unreadable, because there are no systems that are able to access the media created by the system. Meanwhile, the original Doomesday book created in 1086 by Norman monks is still in good conditon. See the Gaurdian story…
There is an opportunity to create a service, somewhat similar to data recovery, to move the data from these systems into new formats. This business would need to constantly be in search of the OLDEST equipment, ever reaching further back in time. The further back, the more the value that can be added, as things go from passe to antique.
You could start with:
• 1.44MB Floppy Disks
• 3.5 MB Large Floppy Disk
• Iomega ZIP Drives (100MB and 250MB formats)
• MS DOS, Win 3.11, Win 95
• VCR Drives
With this equipment acquired you could access most anything created post 1990. At that point you work backward to locate ever older storage/conversion equipment. You could get 9 MB Tapes. Scour garage sales in Silicon Valley looking for working yet inexpensive equipment.
Not only would drives be required, but complete working systems where the recovery engineer can sit down and inspect the data with the original program intended to operate the system.
Sounds like a friend of mine’s ideas for a Mac Museum could turn into yet another business…
