Oh, one of the more fun stories about the BBC junking master tapes was when they decided to get rid of a lot of audio masters during the 80's. Owing to the bureaucracy involved, the archivist (Mark Ayres) went through the paper trail and discovered that they had been moved into a spare room to be skipped, but then the process had been interrupted and the tapes were all still sitting there a decade or so later. (From the 'Alchemists of Sound' documentary)

I did not know that, though I've often wondered why they survived when so much else was lost. Also, "stealing the tapes" is not exactly a trivial exercise - the original Quad tapes were massive - 2" wide, 10.5" diameter and about 5KG each. If they had 2 episodes each, that's about 22 tapes he'd have had to sneak out of the archives. Not exactly something you can fit in your pocket...

Ah yes, I knew I'd forgotten something - checking that link out. Thanks, it was well worth reading. I particularly liked how the NTSC icon was washed out compare to the PAL one...

AFAIK all the Jon Pertwee episodes exist, but not all of them exist in colour. In these cases, the Quad tapes were erased but the 16mm B/W copies for export survived. Some of them exist in colour but derived from low-quality copies (IIRC they managed to digitally marry the chroma signal from a Umatic copy of the NTSC conversion with the higher-res 16mm print to improve the quality).

A couple of years back someone devised a way of partially reconstructing the colour signal by digitally decoding the RGB triads on a high-res scan of the print, so the B/W-only episodes may yet be colourised.

This. Yet another reason for me to stay with WindowMaker.

One doesn't need to taste a shit to tell it isn't chocolate.

How about the Doomsday Book? Not music, but an unholy hybrid of laserdisc media using a proprietary variant hooked up to a 512k BBC Micro.

To be sure, there are a lot of examples of things that would have been lost if they had been digital - most of the recovered Dr. Who episodes, that Woody Guthrie concert from 1949, the stereo masters for Jesus Christ Superstar, Court of the Crimson King and untold others.

A lot of people in this thread seem to have been pooh-poohing the idea of using tape as an archival format, saying that you should store everything digitally and constantly reconvert it to new formats - for some reason this isn't seen as a problem, even though all of the things I've listed above were found in a shoe box or in the back of a long-forgotten cupboard etc. 40 years after they were made (nearly 60 for the Guthrie wire recordings).

No, mag tape is not perfect, and yes, some of the more exotic formats are getting difficult to play back. But archival masters are in standard formats for that reason, and it's not outrageously hard to make a machine capable of playing them back - even the sticky shed issue is understood and fixable. Mag tape is not perfect, but it can be played back after being left forgotten in a vault for decades and that is something digital does not currently offer.

Bottom line? Make digital and analogue copies. That way, at least one of them should survive.

I'd say it's more like decades. I believe Otari are still making the 5050. There are others who are reconditioning older machines (ATR Service for one) and the market for rubber rollers and drive belts has become something of a cottage industry. The big problem for manufacturing new decks is that ebay is flooded with the things and that makes it very, very difficult to compete with new equipment.

To turn your argument around, I've had CD-Rs go bad and those are a digital format... It is worth keeping in mind that archiving something onto tape is a known science, and that 8-track was a cheap, disposable format that no-one ever used for archiving.

There are standard archival formats for tape (1/4", usually 15ips, 2 track, no NR, either NAB or IEC curve depending if you're in the US or Europe). Back in the day this was pretty much the universal format - the album would be mixed to that, the duplication master would go to the pressing plant in that format, when they remaster something from the original master tapes today, the source media will be in that format also. To play it back, you need a machine that runs the tape in front of a pair of coils at a constant 38 cm/sec. Unless the tape is of a type that goes sticky, you should be able to recover the audio, regardless of age, and that is not something you could say the same of for a Protools project on a flash drive.

Depends on the substrate and adhesive. I suspect there are Nazi-era tapes that are still playable (this was certainly the case as of 1991, see 'The Secret Life of the Video Recorder': http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gOULWR4h4Io#t=1017 ...17 minutes in)

There were a lot of problems with tapestock from 1975-1994 which used a synthetic substitute for whale oil. Japanese tapes that carried on using whale oil (Maxell) and formulations prior to this are rock-solid, and Ampex/Quantegy tape from 1995 and later have proven stable to date. When it comes to being able to stick it on a shelf and play it back 20 years later (or in the case of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', 42 years later), digital formats simply aren't in the same ballpark - and I suspect a lot of this is because the density has increased so much.

First program I ever wrote was on the used Casio Graph 25 I got, and that one wasn't even a powerful or well done language.
By the end of high school I had a used Graph 65 where I wrote minesweeper, chess clock, mandelbrot set plot, and one of those bomber games which sucked since the display was too slow for it (It had a colour one) and a good couple of calculation programs - and it brought me to trying to program on a computer (C and Fortran 77). For kids who have some interest in messing with this sort of a thing, programmable calculators are a great starter that you can poke around in and do fun, rewarding things, unlike a computer where you have to learn a fuckton just to do basic things.

The only proof of this happening is your assertion. As far as I'm concerned, it's scumbags being executed - say the directors responsible for the melamin saturated human and pet foods. And thousands others. I fail to see why such scum should not be used.
Besides, if the rich want, they can get organs off the black markets, for example, Serbian kidneys by which the albanian scum financed their terrorist gatherings that , with western support, caused Kosovo to split off.

Occasionally I've pondered releasing the MIDI (or Rosegarden) files for some of my songs, and that's one of the reasons I've balked at it - you need to have a fairly good grasp of MIDI to be able to play it back at all. Most MIDI files you find on the 'net are GM standard, with 128 preset instruments which will play back more-or-less the same on any GM-compatible device.

That works for the music in DOOM, but it all goes out the window once you start writing MIDI files for a Korg Triton EX on one interface, Hammond Organ clone on another, a digital mellotron clone daisy-chained to that, and on the other interface a bunch of analogue polysynths and a monosynth with custom patches, filter sweeps on the controller usually used for changing the MIDI bank, and a pitch bend wheel that spans two octaves. With a bit of effort you could map it to GM (assuming you're not doing minimoog solos which depend on monophonic note priorities), but you'd end up with a pale shadow of the song compared to the recorded version.

must be overjoyed. Way to go! Let's waste even the single good thing that can come from those scheduled for execution.

How about data retention? That is also a function of the cell size, since the more electrons you have in the charge trap, the greater the difference between 1 and 0. Intel's drives, for example, are only guaranteed to hold their contents for three months without power. And when they are powered, they keep the data alive by periodically rewriting it, which I strongly suspect amounts to a P/E cycle. (Not sure about flash, but a lot of memory devices use an 'erase' to set the bits high, and then short out the ones they want to be zero, so a lot more actions are liable to count as an performing an 'erase' than deleting a file.)