Re: Resurgence of non-mainstr
By: Boraxman to Kaelon on Tue May 03 2022 06:34 pm
> I still have some data from the 90s and 2000's, but most people I would
> wager, don't, and if they do, it is lost, obscure, opaque. Look at all the
> BBS's that existed in the 80's and 90's, how many of those are now lost
> forever?
Very well stated. And this is the tragedy, really, of our current digital ecosys
tem. In the late 1980s, my dad interviewed the entire family and built a compreh
ensive family tree stretching back into the 1400s -- which he then reconciled wi
th Church records in Spain to go back even further! -- but he stored it on tape
backup.
Two problems:
1. The tape backup, which for all you know may still be readable, depends upon h
ardware that is no longer produced.
2. The family tree software, which was legacy DOS and never ported or migrated,
is impossible to find now and it's a relic. He may have it in disks somewhere, b
ut it's probably 5 1/4" disks rather than the somewhat-more-manageable 3 1/2", w
hich also poses other media problems.
Between the loss of media inter-operability and format / software conversion, th
at entire labor - and the wealth of family knowledge from relatives who have sin
ce passed on - is, as far as the rest of the family is concerned, totally lost.
How do we even begin to solve problems as large as human history's recorded defi
cit, when we can't even deal with the BBS'es from the 1990s or family trees from
the 1980s?
_____
-=: Kaelon :=-
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