RE: Our responsibilty with Inkjet Printing

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<x-charset iso-8859-1>John,

In general, I concur with what you have said; but as usual, I do have some
reservations.  Just as the 5 1/4 drives have all but disappeared from the
new and used marketplace - except maybe hamfests and the like, similar
things have taken place with respect to tape drives and SyQuest drives among
others.  There has been a rumor circulating in my neck of the woods that
eventually the 3.5 drives will also disappear and be replaced with Zip or
120 floppy drives (which are backward compatible currently).  To be sure if
one wants to expend the time, energy, and money, one can probably find some
of this older obsolete hardware and retrieve a file; but most people (I am
speaking of ordinary individuals and not professional computer types or
those on research grants, corporate or large company establishments, or
academic or governmental institutions) frequently and typically do not have
the time, energy, patients, or funds available to do the search or even in
some cases acquire the hardware.  So what you say may in principle and in
fact be true, it is not an effortless accomplishment if it can indeed be
accomplished.

I also agree with you statement concerning the common file formats.  While
this is not to say that they never will change or cannot become obsolete, I
think that the occurrence will take place at a much slower place than many
of the other changes in the computer world.

My only major point would be to suggest in the context of the whole
discussion, your attention is directed to only one side of the equation when
it comes to the distribution of images - namely the buyers side of the
equation.  They typically are buying prints not files; they want and expect
some degree of longevity, and they do not want to have to keep going back to
the seller to buy or get them to print up new replacement prints from the
original or duplicate files.  From their point of view the life span of the
digital file is not relevant or significant.  But you are not addressing
this and I realize that.  I am not criticizing you for not addressing it but
merely pointing out the area which is being ignored in the concern over the
life span of files in this general discussion under this header.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com
[mailto:owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com]On Behalf Of John Matturri
Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2000 12:11 PM
To: epson-inkjet@leben.com
Subject: Re: Our responsibilty with Inkjet Printing


On the future accessibility of media / formats.

Maybe too much is being made of past experience with now-unreadable computer
tapes and formats. By the present there may be enough of a critical mass
that
efforts will be made to keep old data accessible. I can't read my 51/4"
disks on
my current computer, but I'm pretty sure I could find one to hook up if I
needed
a file on one (actually, I've been pretty good at migrations). In the future
it
seems likely that there will be some form of service bureau to recover data,
as
long as it hasn't been totally corrupted in a physical sense. There are also
very few file formats that I can't read, going back to the the early 80s
and,
for example, early versions of dos-Wordstar. Recently, I needed to recover
some
files in propietary Grandview (a much missed outline processor that has
never
been matched) format and in a short time located a conversion program.

That said, you obviously should migrate to relatively recent media and stick
to
relatively common formats. It seems unlikely that .tif, .pdf, and .jpg files
will become totally unreadable given the great amount of information stored
in
them. I suspect that, at the very least, conversion utilities will be
available
for these for a long time to come, barring the effects of war, extended
depression, etc.

John M.

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