18.274 losing it

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 274.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 10:07:07 +0100
         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
         Subject: losing it

Members of Humanist will be interested in the BBC Radio 4 programme,
"Losing the Past", the first part of which was broadcast Wednesday 6 Oct
9-9.30pm, with the second part to follow 13 October at the same time.
Ironically, given the theme of this programme, the now vanished occasion of
the first part can be recovered digitally via the BBC Website from anywhere
the Web reaches, and the second part will be available from the same
location in a week's
time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/losing_the_past.shtml. Following
is the first paragraph from the page:

>In our headlong rush to go digital much of our past is becoming just
>meaningless code of 0s and 1s. A substantial amount of material stored on
>computers, magnetic tape and even CDs is no longer accessible due to rapid
>deterioration and obsolescence. The average life of a tape is fifteen
>years, a CD twenty, computer systems and software far less.

My thanks to my colleague Brett Lucas for drawing attention to this programme.

Yours,
WM

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Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
Received on Fri Oct 08 2004 - 05:20:07 EDT