zlacker

>>sohkam+(OP)
I visited the Computer History Museum this year during Vintage Computer Festival West. When not only can you tour the museum, but the upstairs rooms are crammed full of hundreds of amazing personal collections of vintage computing hardware all powered up and usable. It was a religious experience.

>>tracer+02
It will be interesting to see the durability of print vs digital content of time.

Many web properties are no longer accessible due to M&A activity and Small/solo publishers unable or unwilling to maintain their assets. Archives like WayBack Machine mitigates some of the loss of digital content so long as the archives themselves are still maintained.

Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?

>>PaulWa+W2
As photography was largely switching to digital, I sometimes wondered whether--whatever the preservation possibilities that digital offered--to what degree photos would really be preserved in practice relative to prints and slides.

>>ghaff+7V
Most photos are terrible. Colors can start fading in at little as 10 years if they were hanging on your wall that long. B&W can last longer, but still will fade. Of course there are different process, if you use the best process photos will last longer, but still they are not very stable.

Digital makes it cheap and easy to have multiple in many locations. While any one media may fail, you still have a copy - I have on this computer all the data from whatever computer I was using 15 years ago. (most of it I have not looked at in 20 years and I could safely delete, but it is still here, and on other backup systems I have)

>>bluGil+1z1
My point was there's the capability to do all this backup preservation but it doesn't just happen. And it's less visible in many cases than the proverbial shoebox full of photos will be.

>>ghaff+Vz1
What is the difference between photos on a crashed harddrive, and photos in a shoebox that that just burned in a house fire? Photos are vulnerable to many different attacks just like digital data.

These days your photos are probably backed up by facebook, google, or are such major players. (there are a lot of privacy concerns with the above, but they do tend to have good backups)