The value of paper records.

[Dinosaur]

Imagine two neighbors searching their attics 1000 years from now.

One finds a treasure map left by a pirate. He enlists the help of some linguists & historians. He manages to find the buried treasure.

The other finds a CD with label indicating that it contains a treasure map created from a paper map. He needs to find or emulate a computer from 1000 years ago. He needs to find or emulate a CD reader from that era. He needs to find the pertinent graphics program to enable him to read the map. He is unlikely to be successful

 

[sideshowbob]

He needs to find or emulate a computer from 1000 years ago. He needs to find or emulate a CD reader from that era. He needs to find the pertinent graphics program to enable him to read the map.

There's an app for that. His fridge will be able to do it in a nanosecond.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Unless there's been a catastrophic world war or some other event that drives us back into the Stone Age and destroys our artifacts, a computer built in 3015 will be able to decipher a computer record from 2015 in a few nanoseconds. In fact it will probably have access to the history of computing, including all of the specifications of our era.

 

[mathman]

Unless there's been a catastrophic world war or some other event that drives us back into the Stone Age and destroys our artifacts, a computer built in 3015 will be able to decipher a computer record from 2015 in a few nanoseconds. In fact it will probably have access to the history of computing, including all of the specifications of our era.

Don't be so sure. If you have a mag. tape (computer ~ 1960) or floppy disk, you would find it difficult to read either of them today.

 

[Doug Coulter]

They were often difficult to read at the time! I was there!

 

[cosmictraveler]

How would anyone know what to look for in the future since 1000 years all knowledge of the types of information supplied by computers wouldn't be even known so they wouldn't know what to look for or where.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Good point. You'd hope they wouldn't eat the books!

 

[Russ_Watters]

The bigger problem, for both the book and the cd is degradation. Most CDs will last less than 100 years, while books can last longer if protected, but are much more succeptible to damage.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Or self destruction. One of my favorite ones, "Radio Engineers Handbook" by Fredrick Terman, was printed right at the end of WWII (1943). On high-acid paper (there's even an apology for it in the foreword). I have 3 copies...one of which is still in OK shape, the rest are pages falling apart and rotting on their own accord. A shame, other than active solid state stuff, everything in there is still correct, and relevant to a degree. Add bandgaps, power gain, and such and it'd be complete. No kidding - wire still has the same ohms per foot as then, the same stray inductance and capacity, and so on...it's still handy.

 

[cosmictraveler]

Or self destruction. One of my favorite ones, "Radio Engineers Handbook" by Fredrick Terman, was printed right at the end of WWII (1943). On high-acid paper (there's even an apology for it in the foreword). I have 3 copies...one of which is still in OK shape, the rest are pages falling apart and rotting on their own accord. A shame, other than active solid state stuff, everything in there is still correct, and relevant to a degree. Add bandgaps, power gain, and such and it'd be complete. No kidding - wire still has the same ohms per foot as then, the same stray inductance and capacity, and so on...it's still handy.

For now but perhaps in the far future there will be no wires but a way to transmit power through other means like microwave as an example. Perhaps all electronics as we know them will be replaced by other devices.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Actually, the book covers microwaves far better than most more-modern texts do...that's part of the "Radio" in the title. And, BTW, shows why no one uses radio waves to xmit power, or for that matter, light (photons either way). Serious losses due to spreading and re-conversion into some more-useful form. You can get away with loss with wireless charging, since the power delivered is tiny, and your supply is so cheap that tossing 90% out the window is acceptable. That's at short range. And no, Maxwells equations pretty much cover the turf. This isn't a thing that has changed since he wrote them down at all.

Well, not no one. I live off the grid on my solar system and all that power is transmitted by photons from the sun. At enormous loss, I might add, but then, I'm not paying for the sun to shine myself, so the situation is analogous.

 

[Billy T]

Or self destruction. One of my favorite ones, "Radio Engineers Handbook" by Fredrick Terman, was printed right at the end of WWII (1943). On high-acid paper (there's even an apology for it in the foreword). I have 3 copies...one of which is still in OK shape, the rest are pages falling apart and rotting on their own accord. A shame, other than active solid state stuff, everything in there is still correct, and relevant to a degree. Add bandgaps, power gain, and such and it'd be complete. No kidding - wire still has the same ohms per foot as then, the same stray inductance and capacity, and so on...it's still handy.

If it is thick and with red cover, I had one too. It got dropped in my move to Brazil - most in it is now only a few clicks at Google way. I was a radio "Ham" W8ijm.* Got lot of my equipment as WWII surplus. Used those nice small receivers that had been in airplanes. Got several dozen Crystals, very, very, cheap as they were for frequencies just below the 40M ham band. I got good at taking them apart and grinding them thinner into that band - eventually a 50% yield. With my 807 final stage (~50W) I worked all 48 states in code (not voice with only 50W). - That certificate did make it to Brazil.

I do note that with high frequencies where not too large antenna can form small divergence beam you can send and recover up to 50% of the power several miles, but that is good only for well known (and normally fixed) receiving location. - not much good for powering a moving device. Also a wire, does better and is more than 100 times cheaper for points on earth.

If video is of your "off grid" home, congratulations. I see you get sky TV etc. What battery do you use?

* I also got my First Class Commercial license. Surely the youngest to ever hold one. The chief engineer of WCHS a 24/7 50KW station, had four employees, - not enough when they got their 3 week vacations. The chief was patient of my MD dad and knew I was Ham, etc. He promised me same salary as they got, If I could pass the ~4 hour exam. I did on first try, and many adults don't. That pay was >30 times my paper route income, and all I did to earn it was sit in chair with station volume up very high. If sound ceased, that snapped me to attention, from book I was reading. I also filled in for one who was sick a few times during the school year.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Yup, that's the one. I prefer dead-tree media for some things, rather then google et al, though. I haven't yet found where anyone has just scanned this in for me to get as a .pdf (probably a picture of each page), rats - I have a lot of others.

I'm supposing you're thinking of the old ARC-5 radios. They were cool! I had a few. I converted them (well, built a PS) to run off 12v w/o a dynamoter, and they were tons of fun. I have all the gear, but no ham license. I'm using some of it with the fusor project (particle beam bunching). My ham friends are bugging me to go ahead and get a license, but it's kind of daunting in some ways. If I could just take the General test, I'd fly through, but you have to take the Technician test first, and therefore memorize all those arbitrary limits on what parts of what bands you can use...don't have time for that. I was raised by an EE on surplus gear, used to love to hit the stores for that when they still existed. Still have some of it. And about the largest vacuum tube collection there is (10's of thousands). One of my backup generators, not in use right now, uses the generator from a P-51 Mustang hung on a honda engine. Other than the Volt, it's the most efficient one I have, including a fairly new small Honda inverter-generator. But using the Volt as a generator messes up my nice mileage numbers...good in a pinch, but I try to avoid any generator when I can. The Volt beats them like a red-headed stepchild when it comes to KwH per gallon.

Here's the problem with RF (other than the usual inverse square law + skin-effect losses). By the time you get up in frequency high enough that a reasonable sized antenna is highly directional, you're well into microwaves (a really good one is at least 10x a wavelength across). Remember those ovens? Would you really want to be inside a kW-level beam? I've seen the dead bird field around a big radar, and those don't actually have a lot of RMS power density these days. Losses are still huge compared to wire, and in the rain...and so on. At LF you can use inductive coupling at really short ranges (tuned transformer) and yes, that kinda works, was recently rediscovered (dumb academics didn't read Terman to know it's been around longer than they've been alive - I frequently email guys like that and they often see what they think they've invented is in a book from the '50s or before and have to pull their patents or grant requests, they don't like me much some days) and is now proposed for all manner of lossy charging of devices and even electric cars...again, only workable if you're willing ot toss out a lot of cheap power. I'm not, I sweat the milliwatts here - a penny saved, and all that. I worry less about tiny stuff now that I have more panels and a swing-load - the car (Chevy Volt, love it) - to handle any extra and also add battery capacity in a pinch.

No, that wasn't a TV antenna, it was a satellite internet link, now unused. Yes, that's my "house" although for legal purposes it's a barn - saves on taxes like you'd not believe. Nice to be out in "nowhere" where you can get away with things like that.
I had a 3rd (?) class commercial when I fixed CB radios for people back in the craze days for that. Never went further with it, I got into computers. I had a really low badge number at DEC.

I'm using lead-acid (yeah, I know) batteries from Rolls-Surrette, about the best you can get for that tech. I'd kill for a large set like in the Volt (several of them would be required to match the capacity I now have), but those require a lot more automation infrastructure as well. I obviously don't have to care what they weigh. I most often simply don't do much power consuming at night so as to avoid the round-trip losses in LA batteries, and avoid shortening their life.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Don't be so sure. If you have a mag. tape (computer ~ 1960) or floppy disk, you would find it difficult to read either of them today.

There are plenty of old desktop computers languishing in university storerooms, government basements and suburban garages. It won't take long to find a diskette drive.

The mag tape would be another story. Those old mainframe computers were gigantic, and so were their peripheral devices. Nobody has one in his basement. Nonetheless, if the data on an old tape is critical, rest assured that the U.S. government has all the necessary hardware to read it. Magnetic media are magnetic media, no matter what the era, and they have all the tools to decode it.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Careful when you say no one has one in his basement (there are basements and warehouses that would defy belief if you hadn't seen them, and mine isn't special)...I happen to have transports and the hard-to-make crucial parts - multitrack tape heads. But it would take quite a bit of work to make any of that old junk fly again. By then, the oxide would have flaked off the tape as it's doing already in storage, and the plastic getting brittle as well as the oxide binder. I will probably at some point sell all that junk for scrap, though.

 

[Billy T]

... I'm supposing you're thinking of the old ARC-5 radios. They were cool! I had a few. I converted them (well, built a PS) to run off 12v w/o a dynamoter, and they were tons of fun. I have all the gear, but no ham license. I'm using some of it with the fusor project (particle beam bunching). My ham friends are bugging me to go ahead and get a license, but it's kind of daunting in some ways. ...

I seem to recal that ARC-5 designation, but if they had a black metal disk on the front, about 3+ inch in diameter, that showed the frequency, that's it for sure. I lived in the city so had line power and made a well filtered AC to DC power supply to power them, but seem to recal they were 24V DC.

My dad was a ham too. W8atf, and we had a mil surplus PE-103. (Why after all these years I'm sure that was its designation - I don't know -"mind clutter" I guess.) It took in 12V (or only 6V - not sure) DC from our car battery (or generator at driving speed) and put out 250V DC as I recall. Motor generator on common shaft. Once it nearly killed us - in rapid motion we made voice contact in Cuba from the hills of West Virginian and almost drove off the road in the excitement!

I had gotten up to about 10words/ minute several times and you needed 13wpm to get the ham license; then the FCC made a one year not extendable "novice licence" with less than 10wpm requirement (as I recall) so quickly got that license. Using it I was soon solid at 15wpm and took the 5-minute code test ARRL gave every month or so. (had to get one minute of copy error free to pass) I was surprised to find I did that and got certified at 20wpm, but did not deserve that. As you write it down, a few of the words I copied were not words, so I corrected with quasi-lucky guesses, before mailing my copy in.

Each of the words of the tests were a sets of several that differed by one letter. I said "quasi-luck" as when I had a non-word, and changing my "a" (dit daw) to "n" (daw dit) would make a word, that is what I did. I would not change it to "b" even though that was a word too as daw, dit, dit, dit would not have been mistaken for only two sounds. Hope my memory of those letters is OK, but you get the point.

There is a stagnation point in code speed; so long as you are thinking in terms of dit and daw patterns, you cant get above about 10wpm. You need not to even consciously hear the daws and dits - but hear the sound pattern rhythm to go faster. Some people get very fast - can copy code faster than they can talk - can't tell you the message - they just understand it. Story is that Edison as a youth had job at telegraph office and would keep whole messages in his head before starting to write them down. Could remember one, and yet follow another while fixing his coffee etc.

On you "Barn" I owned 16 acres I had bought, years before owing a house, along where I-95 was to be, that was zoned residential* - high tax rate, but I made it a farm by keeping hive of bees and claimed to sell honey (even paid a few dollars of sales tax on "phantom sales.") It was mainly wooded and I did sell wood as trees were thinned too. Actually I got only a little honey for my own use, as I did not live there and some times when coming to collect fallen limbs for fire wood would need to put the hive sections back together - bad boys, I assumed, had knocked them apart with thrown stones or long poles.

* I subdivided it into five lots myself with The HP-35 calculator that had just come out (cost about $500). Our group at work had bought one, and I borrowed it weekends. Few professionally made subdivision had lots that actually closed - I recorded the deeds my self too. My boundary lines had 4 decimal places - probably the only one in Howard County's land records that had less than a mm non-closure gap!

I sold a lot every few years - to spread out my tax gains. All in All, my profits were at least 20 times what I had paid years earlier. The remainder, I sold to one of the buyers years later for about 10 times what I paid for it all ~ 15 years earlier - it is still wooded; and I as I had no need of the money, I financed his purchase. Last of his 20 year mortgage payments to me (at 7% interest!) will be paid only this year in June. - By far the best investment I have ever made and fun to do all the work myself.

 

[Doug Coulter]

Yup, ARC-5. Yes, they used 12v tubes in series and ran on 24 (which is my main battery here as well). I changed it IIRC by either changing the tube types or rewiring the filaments so I could run on car battery. I then made an inverter using Delco PNP germanium power transistors for the HV, using a vibrator supply transformer (less emi than a vibe). I seem to recall the same number on that other dynamotor, and boy were they not-efficient. Never used it much. Silicon transistors were a dream of the future then. They hadn't yet made any pure enough to get the bulk conductivity down at that point.

Heck, I still have old CRT radar display tubes in my junkpile, the kind with a deflection connection in the center of the tube face to make the drive electronics less complex. I gotta find a museum that wants that kind of stuff.

I know about plateaus and such from also being a musician. Pretty much the same deal there - at some point, it becomes obvious and in muscle memory as a "mental subroutine" and you just think it and it happens. They don't even have a code test anymore (thank heavens). But I talk to most of my ham friends now on G+, where we have...full duplex video...and use my ham rig stuff (and I have quite a lot of RF gear) on my particle beam stuff. It's "dual use", if you will. And BTW, it's the proximate driver of our recent breakthrough...interesting.

If was fun doing all the work myself in my 30's but not as much now in my 60's....I'm working on automating homestead tech these days to lighten the maintenance and monitoring load at least. Don't think I'll come up with a wood chopping/splitting/stacking robot unless it's a neighborhood kid in need of cash, though. I still have to handle it again to shove it in a stove when its cold. WVA isn't too far from here...so you know the climate.

 

[gmilam]

I have photographic negatives from 100 years ago than I can still make prints from.

I have floppy discs from 20 years ago that are obsolete - and may be unreadable.

 

[Doug Coulter]

I tossed my old 8" floppies out, just before a museum wanted them, rats. They had the source code for CPM on them, too...but they didn't read reliably even new. On the other hand, the other day I wanted something I just knew I had, turned on an old NT machine that I thought had it on there - and it booted fine and I was able to recover the data I was after, this thing was decades old I believe - the BIOS battery was long dead, but who cares? But I also agree - a negative seems like forever, or pretty close. CD's can be good, the pressed ones, not the burnable-dye ones. I happen to like paper, as it had the first hyperlinks (eg bookmarks or fingers) and sometimes reading off a screen just doesn't get it compared to curling up with a book.

Winchester disks (the first that were sealed) do seem to last quite awhile. I have some 2 gb ones from when they were the biggest you could get...that still work. Great big ol' bits have a life. Tiny ones, not as much.

Speaking of negatives (which are a lot of atoms/bit, however) one has to wonder how well a hologram preserves due to minor degradation of the exact location of the silver in there (long term diffusion, this kind of thing).

 

[Billy T]

... use my ham rig stuff (and I have quite a lot of RF gear) on my particle beam stuff. It's "dual use", if you will. And BTW, it's the proximate driver of our recent breakthrough...interesting. ...

Nice exchange with self reliant fellow "old timer" but what is your "particle beam" and "breakthrough"? Are you self taught? I have a Ph. D.in physics, but the field has become so mathematical I lost interest in it 25 Years ago. (never was any good with tensor equations.)

By edit after reading your posts in the "bugs worth fixing..." thread. I lived quite close to you when I should have been in fourth grade. In Virginia past Bluefield on route 19 then side dirt road. We had no electricity, but made a small dam with over shot water wheel that ran a car generator geared up with cascaded fan belt wheels as RPM step up. After about a week down at the creek, the battery was charged up and we could hear the radio. WWII ended and we only learned that several days later when battery was recharged again. I learned a lot more that year than if I had been going to school.

An abandoned field was "mine" - I raised corn on it. I got two bushels shelled out that I sold to local moonshiner. He had rock filled tin cans hanging from many tree branches as his alarm system. The REA (Rural Electrification Agency) flew low looking for power line problems or new routes. On lower side of its wings was painted: "Don't shoot. Stills not reported."