[SPG_Active_Members] Long-term Digital Preservation: your technical questions of Sept. 1

[Tim Shoppa]

Henry Gladney <hgladney at gmail.com> wrote:
> However, realistically it will still be some years before anybody is likely
> to use any VM for this purpose.  E.g., I very much doubt that anybody at CHM
> will want to emulate anything in its early years of SW preservation
> management.

It's not entirely an academic problem. I have tools that I wrote
for dealing with tape and disk images 15 or 20 years ago, that won't
compile on modern machines because I wrote them in K&R C assuming a
certain endianess, or more typically I picked up someone else's K&R C
or Pascal or whatever tools and hacked them to do what I needed.

Patching these tools to run or rewriting them
from scratch is usually easy enough, but these are tools of often
trivial complexity.

Maybe the lesson is to not write end-all-and-be-all
tools but to have simple tools; this implies (I believe) simple
formats for disk/tape images.

Tim.