puredrifting
Major Contributor
Ahh, but you are forgetting the digital conundrum. Do you think in 40 years there will be widely accessible devices that will be able to read massively outdated optical formats and more significantly, will there still be operating systems that the mysterious "DeeVeeDee" and "BloooRay" players/readers will need to be able to reproduce the digital stream that the devices are capable of outputting so that the zeros and ones can be turned into something accessible by whatever were using then? Perhaps, perhaps not. Ask those of us who have floppies, Zip and Jaz drives laying around in the archives if we can easily access the materials contained within. If you are a writer, there is still something immensely appealing about a typewritten page and if you are a filmmaker, there is still something appealing about a piece of film. The material is optical, you can hold it up to light and see an image. I have almost no faith that in 50 years, any of our current digital media will be easily accessible. Then there is the well documented issue of digital rot. https://www.theguardian.com/technol...arns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf
I've personally dug through the archives of Disney, Fox, the Margaret Herrick Library, University of Indiana and dozens of others at length and have witnessed what time does to all forms and formats of media. I laugh at the first commercial I ever directed, a 16mm spot that was edited to and mastered to D1. That huge D1 tape is just sitting in my archive next to D2 and D3 tapes, 1" analog and 2" Quad tapes and even some Ampex DCT tapes. Most of these machines barely exist anymore, yet a mere 15-20 years ago, they were the state of the art. There is a reason that almost not a single one of John Ford's immense body of silents he directed for Fox in the teens and twenties do not exist and are lost forever. There is a reason why negatives from a huge amount of the work from the Golden Age of Cinema no longer exist, not to mention the absence of any original copies of most of the original film noir. We switch formats like we switch TV channels, there are so many outdated formats, it's ridiculous. That's one thing our forefathers didn't have to deal with as much. 16 and 35mm film have been around a while as was analog audio tape.
I am in agreement with a lot of the experts in digital media, we are already in a hopeless black hole with digital and so far, nobody has figured a way out of it. We are generating so many billions of Petabytes of data yet nobobdy has figured out a long term, reliable, simple storage and retrieval mechanism that will be accessible in half a century, a century or more yet.
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